Black Lives Matter ... the Caribbean edition

It blows my mind even after all these years of schooling that it would have been a completely different and better world if and only if the British had not wandered off those islands.  Of course I am biased.  But, come on!

Whenever I get way too angry about how the colonizers messed up the Subcontinent forever, I console myself that it could have been worse.  Like how the Congolese were butchered and maimed by blood-thirsty Belgians under their king.  Or how the Dutch massacred people in ... oh, the list is long, dear reader.  In the process of consoling myself, I then end up getting angrier about all of us from, and in, the "shitholes" who were terrorized by the melanin-impaired from the cold climes.

Anyway ... a couple of months ago, forced by the coronavirus to watch movies at home, we ended up wasting our time on a C-grade movie that was set in England.  One of the bizarre sub-plots involved the backstory of how the father earned his fabulous riches from the sugar plantations that he owned in the Caribbean.  This sub-plot that was left dangling hinted that the father was not any good-hearted colonizer.

The British did make quite some gold out of those plantations, which is why Trevor Noah wittily joked about the Common"wealth" games and how Jamaica might possibly get the gold back one medal at a time.

How important was Jamaica and the Caribbean to those godawful British?

Throughout the eighteenth century the empire’s epicenter lay not in North America, Africa, or India but in a handful of small sugar-producing Caribbean islands. The two most important—tiny Barbados and its larger, distant neighbor Jamaica—were among the most profitable places on earth. On the eve of the American Revolution, the nominal wealth of an average white person was £42 in England and £60 in North America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200. Immense fortunes were made there and poured unceasingly back to Britain. This gigantic influx of capital funded the building of countless Palladian country houses, the transformation of major cities like London, Bristol, and Liverpool, and a prodigious increase in national wealth.

Fortunes were made far away from the cold and dark and damp British Isles.  How were the fortunes created?

We all know the answer.  It is one word.

Slavery.

All this abundance, luxury, and social progress at home derived from the brutal exploitation of huge numbers of enslaved African men, women, and children across the Atlantic (thousands of whom were brought over to the British Isles as well): by the eighteenth century, Britons were the world’s preeminent slave traders.

Nearly two years ago, when I was in Chennai for a longer-than-usual stay in Chennai, I went to the local literary festival.  One of the talks that I attended was by Venki Ramakrishnan--the Nobel laureate.  In selling the importance of science, he stretched his argument by talking up science, technology, and the industrial revolution, as having transformed Britain.  He never said anything about the role of slavery and colonization, which provided Britain with plenty of resources and fortunes.  All the looting!  During the discussions, there was question about this, but he flailed.  He should have instead stuck to talking about the RNA!

If only we would educate kids about the history of these slave traders!

Even the sociopathic enslavers in America were empathetic humans compared to the British enslavers in the Caribbean who inflicted a "sickening degree of extreme violence" on their human chattels.  As difficult as it was to read the following sentences, I forced myself to read them in order to truly understand what it meant to be enslaved by these atrocious creatures from Britian:

In Barbados in 1683, an “old Negro Man” was moved to anger about the bloody flogging of some other slaves: for his “insolent words” he was burned at the stake. At other times, black people were judicially electrocuted, maimed, beaten to a pulp, decapitated, drawn and quartered, roasted alive over “a Slow fire,” or publicly starved to death while suspended in iron cages (“gibbeted”).
Beyond such horrific formal penalties lay the lawless universe of everyday enslavement, in which whites tortured, killed, raped, and mutilated black people with complete impunity. Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary, bookish young Englishman who came to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune, left a matter-of-fact diary of his three and a half decades as a rural overseer and small-time slaveowner. He considered slaves to be rational human beings and treated them as individuals. Like almost all West Indian whites, he also took for granted that they needed to be frequently and harshly punished. He flogged them incessantly and savagely, rubbing salt, chili peppers, lemon juice, and urine into the scarified flesh to increase their suffering. At his whim, any man or woman might be scourged, branded, chained, dismembered, or exposed naked in the stocks day and night, covered in treacle and swarmed by biting flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes he would then force another slave to defecate into the injured victim’s mouth, and gag it shut for “4 or 5 hours.” In his diary are also recorded 3,852 acts of rape or other forced intercourse with almost 150 enslaved women. Other than in the thoroughness of his record-keeping, he seems to have been entirely typical—if anything, relatively restrained—in his behavior.

This was the white man's burden to civilize the non-white world that Kipling championed!

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men"

And what comes with enslaving people?  Hint: One of the rallying chants at the protest movements is directed against ... the heavily armed police.  (Read Jill Lepore's essay on that, and you too will want to defund the police!)

It was the case in Jamaica:

To safeguard its white inhabitants, the colony became ever more heavily militarized. In the aftermath of rebellion, new laws severely curtailed the rights and movements not only of slaves but also of all other nonwhites: white solidarity was increasingly seen as crucial to security. Meanwhile, the widely noticed writings of the planters’ leading apologist, Edward Long, who’d lived through the rebellion, helped develop new, “scientific” theories of black inferiority and racial danger

Seems very contemporary, right?

Ready for the icing on this bloody cake?

[The] independence of most Caribbean colonies in the 1960s was followed by decades of racist British immigration policies that not only sought to prevent black West Indians from coming to the UK but eventually, under the Conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as “illegal migrants.”⁶ In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property. Black lives, white rights.

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

We shall live in peace, some day

Source

Some day, soon, we will have a truth and reconciliation commission that will help us collectively acknowledge the sin of slavery, come to terms with that horrible past, and launch us on a path forward.  And in that process, Juneteenth will become a national holiday.

For now, here's a Langston Hughes poem that I first blogged ten years ago:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Truth, Reconciliation, and Unbearable Burdens

I have written quite a few posts here on the caste and race issues of the old and adopted countries of mine.  The unbearable burdens of the past, as I often note them to be.

In the posts before tRump's election and mOdi's re-election that served as a Rorschach test of sorts, when regular readers had yet to reveal their true colors, the comments say a lot, like:

I understand, but do not subscribe to, the concept that any generation must apologise for the behaviour of previous generations. These symbolic apologies, in my humble view, are mere tokens and are not synonymous with real change, which is what is really important.
Am I to apologize for the actions of unrelated people centuries ago? Hollow apology. We should acknowledge our past and move forward. I am no more responsible for slavery than someone my age in Oregon is a victim of slavery.

Of course, the freedom of expression in a true democracy means that those views and worse are allowed in the public space.  But, if only they would think differently and better!

I wrote in one of my final commentaries for the local newspapers (or, was that the final one?) "We as a country have never truly come to terms with this history and the racial dimensions of contemporary America."  One of the emails that I got was from a reader (a stranger to me) who wrote:

I am so frustrated that Germany, a country which confronted its past head on, cannot be a lesson for America. Even the smallest acknowledgement of the horrors of slavery and the following disastrous treatment of black people cannot be found in the broader culture.
I am amazed that some of our finer movies which made powerfully and emotionally clear the evil and injustice of this treatment can't have a wider and deeper influence on the politics and everyday behavior in the U. S.
For me, some form of reparations seem correct, moral and necessary, but how can such a thing happen without acknowledgement of the crimes? I see your writing as a clear statement for the need of justice deserved.

Germany does provide us with an example that we can learn from.  Even now, in 2019, more than seven decades after the end of WW II, German leaders offer public apologies for the past.  There is no dismissive "acknowledge our past and move forward" nor are they "symbolic apologies."  It is sincere, heart-felt, and constructively moves into actions towards the future.

Angela Merkel did that again during her first visit as German chancellor to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial:

Dressed in black, Merkel said the crimes committed at the site in southern Poland where the Nazis ran their largest death camp would always be part of German history.
“This site obliges us to keep the memory alive. We must remember the crimes that were committed here and name them clearly,” Merkel said during a ceremony attended by the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
“I feel deep shame given the barbaric crimes that were committed here by Germans,” she added. 

What a profound statement by a leader who personally had nothing to do with the barbaric crimes that were committed in the past!

As Harvard's president noted in acknowledging the university's past:

The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore.

Roof’s actions were completely consistent with the cause of that flag and all the “service, sacrifice and heritage” associated with it. The Confederate flag represents treason in defense of human bondage and white supremacy, it always has, and always will. https://t.co/WiKx8EQWFG

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) December 6, 2019

A 400-year old sin

A few days ago, I got a heads-up on Twitter that the Sunday edition of the NY Times would include The 1619 Project.

I told M that we had to buy the print copy because I knew that it would be a treasure for years to come.

A while ago, I worried about the possibility of the hateful, racist tRump presiding over the union as we mark the 400th anniversary of one of the country's original sins.  63 million Americans made that nightmare possible!

Slavery was integral to Jill Lepore's single-volume narration of the history of the United States.  Lepore set out with a clear agenda:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Jefferson was "an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused."  As I noted in that post more than three years ago--a time when the fans of fascists in the old and adopted countries frequently commented at this blog--"If Jefferson had set a better example by freeing his slaves, and as a legislator and president if he had championed the rights of blacks, perhaps our history would have been different."

As always, Frederick Douglass was on the point:

Slavery lies in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.

After going to New Orleans, which included visiting the Whitney Plantation, I wrote in a column in the newspaper:

We as a country have never truly come to terms with the true horrors of the buying and selling of human beings and the atrocious treatment of slaves and, therefore, the racial dimensions of contemporary America.

The 1619 Project gives us more educational opportunities.  But then tRump and his white supremacist toadies believe that the NY Times is fake news and is a propaganda publication.  I don't imagine that they will ever see the errors of their path.

All we can do is continue to fight the good fight.  We shall overcome ... some day!

Southern trees bear strange fruit

I like Jill Lepore's narration for many reasons, one of which she herself writes about:

My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves.  I've pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist ... the teller of truth.

In this, Lepore provides the raw and emotion-laden sentences of slaveholders and abolitionists, of conservatives and progressives, of Lincoln and Davis, ... All these then provide me the evidence to be the critic and call fouls, which I have done in every post that is about Lepore's book.

A reminder again that we are testing out the question that Lepore laid out:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

We know already how much America does not fare well regarding these truths within its ever expanding boundaries.  How about outside its political boundaries?

In the late 1880s, America had an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to "these truths" when the Spanish-American war began in 1898.  "Cubans had been attempting to throw off Spanish rule since 1868, and Filipinos had been doing the same since 1896."

A glorious opportunity to help Cubans and Filipinos with their natural rights and help them regain their sovereignty, right?  "Under the terms of the peace, Cuba became independent."

Do not celebrate, yet, for there is more: "Spain ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, in exchange for $20 million."

Filipinos fought for their independence and were now stuck with the US as their ruler!

A U.S. occupation and American colonial rule were not what the people of Philippines had in mind when they threw off Spanish rule.  The Philippines declared its independence, and Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo formed a provisional constitutional government.

American revolutionaries declared their independence from a far away England, and a hundred years later, the Philippines was declaring its independence from a far away US.  A 100 years makes a huge difference about independence.  And, of course, Filipinos not being white folk also mattered!

Aguinaldo worried about "how bitter is slavery."  Yes, "slavery" was the word he used!

The war began.

From its start in 1899, the Philippine-American War was an unusually brutal war, with atrocities on both sides, including the slaughter of Filipino civilians.  U.S. forces deployed on Filipinos a method of torture known as "water cure," forcing a prisoner to drink a vast quantity of water; most of the victims died. ... Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.

trump now not caring about Puerto Rico is, therefore, not really new. He is merely practicing good old American politics of white supremacy; at least he tossed the people there a few rolls of paper towels!

Lepore writes that this war "dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States."  The jingoistic war chants "filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds."

"If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903.

It was now separate-but-equal--and with lynching!

At this stage, do we really need to check for the answer to this?

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Five-fifths ... but separate

Lincoln's assassination was the literal and metaphorical shot that was clear signal that while slavery was illegal in the US, white supremacy cannot be eradicated through law.

Congress passed four Reconstruction acts, which "divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each ruled by a military general." 

One doesn't need a great imagination to understand that white supremacists in the South were not happy with this. 

And, the southern states were required to draft new constitutions, and "Congress made readmission to the Union contingent on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment."

So far, so good.

But then came the elections of 1876.  Electoral politics took the United States on another path altogether. 

The Party of Lincoln lost, but "disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina."  I suppose even back then Florida was the eye of the presidential election hurricane!

Another compromise, a bargain, resulted.  In order to retain the Oval Office, the Party of Lincoln "abandoned a century long fight for civil rights."

The military withdrew.  The southern white supremacists regained power.  The KKK's terror campaigns stepped up.  Jim Crow laws came into effect. "Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars."  Separate streetcars. Separate bibles in courthouses. Separate windows at post offices.  Separate dining areas. 

The law extended even to children: "In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime."

As Jill Lepore notes, "slavery had ended, segregation had only begun."

Is this when America was great for the current president and his racist voters to make it great again?

"We have lost our Moses"

In the summer of 2016, "before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Dimondale, Mich., where 2.8 percent of the population is African American," then-candidate trump stumped for black votes, by asking them, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

Apparently that question did not get him African-American votes!  But, his negative campaign against Bill Clinton's crime bills, in order to remind blacks about Hillary, paid off well: "In 2016, black turnout was down eight points from 2012."  He and his political adviser and conduit to the Russians and Wikileaks, roger stone, played the dirtiest politics on their belief that “Hate is a stronger motivator than love ... Human nature has never changed.”

All these are a long, long, long way from Lincoln who believed in "the better angels of our nature."

Not all the people in the South wanted to secede.  Even in Virginia, where there was plenty of opposition to secede in the western part of the state.  Jill Lepore writes that in June, after Lincoln's inauguration earlier in March, "they held their own convention and effectively seceded from the state, to become West Virginia."

Ironically, West Virginia today is confederate flag land with people talking about their heritage and is a solid trump country!

Even the soldiers--North and South---fighting in the Civil War, knew well that the conflict was over one and only one issue: Slavery.  In 1862,  "a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade's newspaper wrote:  "Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation if the blacks is wither a fool or a liar."

Contrast that with the racists in today's "Party of Lincoln" who falsely claim that the war was about state's rights and not about slavery and emancipation!

Lepore reminds us: "It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy."

Think about this the next time you see a confederate flag!

Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation, shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibited slavery in the United States, and ran for re-election.  All "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

On Good Friday of 1865--April 14th--Lincoln was shot.  He died the following morning.

The Union is Dissolved

When I came to America and started learning as much Americana as I could in a short time, I was intrigued by Lincoln's debate with Stephen Douglas.  Well they were dramatic re-enactments.

The debates were a huge deal.  Jill Lepore writes that "debate was understood as the foundation of civil society."  Yes, the tragic irony that the civil society that the American experiment was trying to create included slavery and genocide and ethnic cleansing!

Lepore writes:

In 1787, the delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed "to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other."

More than two centuries later, we have a candidate who was elected to office because of his ability to insult and demean people, so much so that there is a list--and this is merely via Twitter--that is often updated!

On August 21, 1858, it was rumble in the jungle. Well, kind of. Lincoln v. Douglas, as candidates for the Illinois senate seat.  The Dred Scott decision was still fresh on everybody's mind, and "Douglas reminded his audience of Lincoln's opposition" to the decision.  The debate was about their interpretations of "the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

Douglas was clear: "This government was made by our fathers on the white basis ... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever."

Ouch!

Now I am able to appreciate a lot more the Lincoln quote that I have read and heard about forever: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people"--not for the benefit of whites alone.  Oh my, what a statement!

Like the current president who won a squeaker with overwhelming support of racists, Douglas also narrowly won.  Lincoln lost.

But, Lincoln had become the leader.  And was the candidate for the presidency in 1860--a four-way race that also included Douglas.

Lincoln won every northern state ... but Lincoln had won hardly any votes in the South.

The crisis was now full blown.

This is the confederacy that trump's "very fine people" love, cherish, and defend!

Politics is a moral issue

A third into the book, I remind myself of the question that Jill Lepore set up for herself and for readers like me:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The evidence thus far does not make the American experiment look good.

In fact, it seems like the experiment gets worse by the page!

The more the North attacked slavery, the more the South defended "their way of life."  More and more compromises were made, in the name of saving the Union.  Morals be damned!

The final proslavery element of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial.

Turn in the runaway slaves?  "These truths"?

Enter Abraham Lincoln.

The 45-year old Lincoln came "out of his law practice and back into politics."  And, "he found a political home in a new political party, the Republican Party, founded in May 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin."

Jill Lepore writes that Lincoln despaired about "what he described as the nation's "progress in degeneracy," a political regression":

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are equal."  We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes."

Lincoln couldn' make serious inroads.  Yet.

In 1857, President Buchanan was sworn in, and dismissed the importance of the slavery issue.

Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.

How awful that the president of the United States did not think that slavery was of pressing and practical importance, leave alone the moral aspects of treating fellow humans as property!

It then comes down to the truths.  If the Constitution and the American experiment rests on three political ideas--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people--then, "does the Constitution sanction slavery or not?"

The US Supreme Court settled it, atrociously, in the Dred Scott case, in which the 7-2 majority ruled that ""no negro of the African race " could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States."

Frederick Douglass thundered, as he always did:

Slavery lies in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.

Or, to use the words of the current president, there were fine people on both sides!

A Civil War was inevitable.

Natives? Check. Blacks? Check. Mexicans? Also check!

The European settlers continued to displace people.  That's what alien settlers always do.  That is happening even now in contemporary times, like how the indigenous Miskitos are under assault in Nicaragua.

In the young USA, the leaders decided that they ought to displace Mexicans too.

Mexico was as large as the US in land area, and had a larger population:

"As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary," writes Jill Lepore.  Yep, the new country was not even 50 years old.  trump's attacks on Mexico are merely the latest in this long history.

Why were the European settlers so interested?  The Mexican territories of "Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton."

Perhaps you have an immediate question: Working on the cotton fields meant slave labor; so, if somehow acquired by the US, would Texas allow slavery?

The anti-slavery north protested.  Mexico considered Texas its province, though a rebellious one.  The US wanted to annex it, and more.  The US laid a trap for Mexico in order to begin a war.  It was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into that trap.  Almost exactly to this date--on January 25th--back in 1845, "the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation."  And about slavery in Texas?  The resolution included a compromise: "The eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion."

From the 3/5ths compromise, the US has been at such dealmaking in favor of slavery; yet, we have a president in office who loudly wondered why they had never struck a deal in the past in order to avoid the Civil War!  What an ignoramus that 63 million elected only because he appealed to their racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and more!

President James Polk had grand dreams to extend the American empire; "Texas was only the beginning," Lepore writes.  He hoped to get Mexico into an armed confrontation, and it happened.  He asked Congress to declare war.

What would happen if the US won the war and gained territory?  Would Mexicans there now become Americans?  Quite a few leaders were against it.  "Ours is the government of the white man."  Would the new territory then be slave states as well?

As the war with Mexico came to and end in the second half of 1847, Polk "considered trying to acquire all of Mexico" from 26 degrees N all the way to the Pacific.  But, it was finally settled at 36 degrees north.  With a formal end to the war in February 1848, "the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States."

Jill Lepore writes: "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."

Build that wall

The Europeans kept coming in by the shiploads.  And the original inhabitants of the land were systematically ousted from their homes and lands.

Jill Lepore writes:

Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers.  Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends.  "This is a free country," a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. ... A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, "The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted."

Maybe the Swede and the Norwegian did not know about the conditions of blacks and the original inhabitants.  Or, maybe they didn't care, and what mattered to them was how the whites were "free" and could enjoy the "principle of equality."

How huge was this white immigration?

European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent [of the U.S. population] in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. ... By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic.

The Catholicism of the new white folk bothered the older white folk who were Protestants.  "By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish.  Signs at shops began to read, "No Irish Need Apply."

To think that America needs to keep immigrants out is a remarkable denial of the country's history.  The current President, who was elected by 63 million racists, openly declares that he would welcome immigrants from Norway but not from "shitholes."

We are yet to reach the critical time of the Civil War.   But, even at this stage of Jill Lepore's history of the US, think again about Frederick Douglass' speech from 1852, in which he thunders:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

When we sing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave," I am not sure who we refer to. 

The revolution in the "shithole"

This is the first long weekend of a new year; Monday is Martin Luther King Day.  Therefore, I will continue to focus on the slavery history of the United States in Jill Lepore's book.

I have written--many times--even in this blog, that I have no idea how African-Americans live without always being angry at the white folk who proudly claim their slave-owning history.  Or, when they openly talk about white supremacy.

Lepore gives me plenty to get angry about--despite that I am not an African-American, and was raised with Brahmin privilege in the old country.  I have no firsthand experience of being the underclass ever, and I am pissed off!

Consider this, for instance: The American Revolution of 1776 echoed across the waters with the French Revolution in 1789.  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Right?

It was the same France that had colonized Haiti, which was then known as Saint-Domnigue. It was "the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest."  Whites on the island were outnumbered by slaves, whose population was eleven times the population of whites.

A "democratic" revolution in the nearby United States, and another in the colonial power.  So, of course, Haiti's brown people rose up in 1791.

The leaders of the American revolution did not support the revolution in Haiti.  Instead, they attacked it.  Not just with words: "Between 1791 and 1793, the United States sold arms and ammunition and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to French planters on the island."  Yep, the young republic set a precedent way back then by sending money and materials to a war, not to help the downtrodden but to support the white and the wealthy!

American newspapers did not cheer the Haitian Revolution, but instead reported it "as a kind of madness, a killing frenzy."

America reinforced itself not as a land of liberty, but as a land of slavery.  How awful!

When George Washington called it quits and headed back home, some of their slaves fled.  Washington "sent a slave catcher" after one of them, who offered to return only if she would be granted freedom.  "Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a "dangerous precedent.""  When Washington died, blacks outnumbered whites in that room, Lepore writes.

Nearly 230 years after that revolution, the sitting President of the United States casually and callously referred to Haiti as a "shithole".

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

We the people ... which people?

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his famous presidential proclamation, freeing slaves.  He was the 16th President.  Why didn't any of the previous fifteen issue such a proclamation?  For that matter, why didn't the first president, Washington, issue one?

Jill Lepore writes:

What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? ...
[Yet] he would not, could not, do it.  Few of Washington's decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.

Lepore doesn't sugarcoat her interpretation of history.  Good for her!

Of course, Washington was acutely aware of the deal that was struck--the three-fifths clause--for the Constitution.  He knew how the slave-owning southern delegates felt about slavery, slaves, and blacks. Like William Loughton Smith of South Carolina, who opposed emancipation "by insisting that if blacks were free they would marry whites, "the white race would be extinct, and the American people would be all of the mulatto breed."

Such bigotry exists today, even nearly 230 years later.  Iowa's long-term representative, steve king, has been saying such crap for years before trump jumped on that hatred and made it a winner!  When trump boasted to king about how much money he had raised for him, king's reply was telling: “But I market-tested your immigration policy for fourteen years, and that ought to be worth something.”

Washington set a precedent: In politics, leaders will compromise on morals and basic human decency for the sake of money and power.  It should not surprise us then that the GOP and 63 million voters prostrated before trump! 

During Washington's time, and later too, slaves were, after all, "property" and, therefore, wealth.  The leaders treated their fellow humans as less-than-human even though they fully knew otherwise.  And they compromised.

They all knew well what they were doing.  Which is why the framers of the Constitution "tried to hide it. Nowhere do the words "slave" or "slavery" appear in the final document."  They tried to hide it.  But, they knew that the truth will reveal itself sooner than later.

Easy truths ...

Of course we have differences of opinions on various aspects of the human condition, within our countries and across the world.  I might disagree with you, dear reader, but I will not lose respect for you simply because we disagree.

However, there are issues where there is simply no fuzziness.  Some issues have only one correct answer each, and everything else is wrong.  And on those issues, if you choose, and advocate for those wrong answers, I lose respect for you. trump is one of those in these contemporary times.  

Three hundred years ago, it would have been slavery.

Even with all the understanding that I have, I simply cannot imagine how one group of humans decided that another group of humans was not not really human.  And, therefore, there was nothing wrong in making them slaves. Raping them. Torturing them. Branding them. How sick does one have to be in order to think this way!

The more Jill Lepore gets into slavery--I am yet to reach 1776 in the book--the faster that I am losing respect for the revered white men.  George Washington, who inherited his first human property as a ten year old, was no exception.  While I have, of course, known about the founders' slave-holding, it feels strikingly new when I read sentences like this:

George Washington's slaves had been running away at least since 1760. At least forty-seven of them fled at one time or another.

Let's recap. Washington, the ardent military man who is already engaged in self-governance for the colonies, is fully aware that his slaves are also willing to risk their lives for freedom by running away from his estate ... and the guy does nothing!

In December 1765, George Mason wrote--an essay--to Washington "in which he argued that slavery was "the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed"--the Roman republic."

Towns here and there voted in favor of abolishing slavery.  But, these were in the minority.

As the armed conflict between the colonies and the British worsened, Lord Dunmore "offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion."  The bastards were no noble saints; it was merely their bloody divide and conquer strategy at play here too.

In doing so, Dunmore tipped the scales:

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina's delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dumore's declaration did "more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies--than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of."

The symbolic Boston Tea Party didn't launch the revolution. Rather "it was this act; Dunmore's offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence."

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

A final piece from Lepore wraps it all up:

If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia's convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature.

Terrible!

You call it war. I call it massacre.

Even as I continue to read Jill Lepore's sweeping, single-volume, history of the United States, it is difficult to shut myself off from the shit that pours out of trump's mouth and tweets.  It is his mouth that is really a shithole!

The horrible human being in the Oval Office evoked the Wounded Knee massacre in a recent tweet, in order to mock Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In this post, I noted from Jill Lepore that between 1500 and 1800, as many as fifty million Native Americans died.  The hunting down of Indians continued on.  Many European settlers believed that “indigenous practices were by definition savage, superstitious and coercive.”  So, what did they do?

In part because of this belief, the U.S. government decided not to recognize Native Americans as citizens of sovereign governments in the 19th century, but as colonial subjects. In 1883, the Department of Interior enacted the first “Indian Religious Crimes Code” making the practice of Native American religions illegal. These codes remained in place until 1934.

Keep in mind that many European settlers were also the same people who fled religious persecution back in their old countries!

In response, Wenger writes, some Native American groups tried to convince government agents that their gatherings were places of “prayer and worship” similar to Christian churches. Others claimed that their gathering were “social,” not religious.
But this kind of masking of religious practices did not stop the U.S. government from using violence to suppress these Native American ceremonies.
In 1890, the U.S. military shot and killed hundreds of unarmed men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in an effort to suppress a Native American religious ceremony called the “ghost dance.”

This is the Wounded Knee that trump uses to mock Warren!  Millions of Jesus-loving born-again Christians voted for this horrible human being?

Lepore writes about the religious revival in the colonies, which gives us an idea of the track record of most of the religious in this country.  But, there were exceptions.  Very, very few.  But, the  kind of exceptions that give us hope.  One of them was Benjamin Lay.  A widely traveled man, and well read, he was one of the first to speak up and loudly against slavery.

In 1718, Lay sailed to Barbados, where he saw people branded and tortured and beaten, starved and broken; he decided that everything about this arrangement was an offense against God, who "did not make others to be Slaves to us."

In contrast, his contemporary, George Washington "inherited his first human property at the age of ten."

After a few years in England, Lay and his wife left for Pennsylania--the Quaker State.

He traveled from town to town and from colony to colony, only ever on foot--he would not spur a horse--to denounce slavery before governors and ministers and merchants. ... His arguments fell on deaf ears.

What a commitment to the cause!

But, even he ran out of steam.  Benjamin Lay became a hermit.

Outside of Philadelphia, he carved a cave out of a hill. Inside, he stowed his library; two hundred books of theology. biography, poetry, and history. He'd decided to protest slavery by refusing to eat or drink or wear or use anything that had been made with forced labor.

Such principled activists are how we will make America great again!

He continued to press Benjamin Franklin about the slaves that he owned.  "Lay pressed him and pressed him: By what right?"

In 1758, "the Philadelphia Quaker meeting formally denounced slave trading; Quakers who bought and sold men were to be disowned.  When Lay heard the news, he said, "I can now die in peace," closed his eyes, and expired.

A hundred years later, the country fought a Civil War over slavery.  But, it took another 100 years to end separate but equal.  And 60 years after that, we have a President who talks about fine people on both sides!

But, at least there were a few people like Benjamin Lay.  May their tribe increase!

Everything flows into the Ganga

All we were taught back in elementary school was that Columbus discovered America, because history is always written by the rich and the powerful, which the white supremacists were for a long time.  Not anymore, because the poor and the powerless are not poor and powerless as they were, though we have to live through the repercussions of the white supremacist actions over the centuries.

Salt Spring's story does not end with the white supremacist invaders and the natives.  The history over the past 150 years is multi-layered.  This post is about blacks in Salt Spring.

The lucky ones who were freed from the chains of slavery in the US, fled to a few states to lead better lives.  Some of them went to California, which did not have slavery. But, that did not mean that California did not have white supremacists.  Blacks felt threatened by some of the legislative shenanigans that were directed towards restricting the freedom.

Before you read on, pull up a map and familiarize yourself with the locations of California and Salt Spring Island.

And then think about the transportation systems of about 1850. No planes. No trains. No automobiles.

Now, consider the nightmarish logistics of getting from northern California all the way to Salt Spring Island, about 170 years ago.

Yet, blacks ventured out to a tiny island far away from anything they would have ever known.

When lives are in danger, people flee.  The logistics matter the least.  That was the story back in 1850, which is no different from what is unfolding in the waters between Africa and Europe, or on land at the US-Mexico border.

Many of Salt Spring's first settlers were Blacks who came from San Francisco. While some of these were former slaves or children of slaves, all were free citizens of the United States when they immigrated to British Columbia. They included a wide cross section of society?merchants, miners, farmers, educators, and others. What these Blacks all had in common was a desire to escape the discrimination they faced then under California law and to be able to function in society as free citizens. Like many other settlers, they had little money. Thus, it was the offer of free land that drew them to an island wilderness.

The governor of British Columbia, Sir James Douglas, welcomed them.  At least partly because of his own roots--his mother was black.

Charlotte Girard, a former University of Victoria professor who began researching the Douglas family tree in the 1970s, determined that Douglas’s mother was Martha Ann Telfer, a free coloured woman of mixed race living in British Guiana. His father was John Douglas, a white Scotsman.

Incidentally, Her fucking Majesty's Ship Ganges that wiped out the natives on Salt Spring Island was built with genuine Malabar teak in Bombay, India!  "Building began in May 1819, under the direction of master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia."  Why a person in a colony of the white supremacists would gladly and proudly build a flagship with 84 guns is simply beyond me!

An unexpected series of lessons in an island that has the contemporary reputation of being home to hippies with artsy galleries, and aging Vietnam war draft dodgers.

The rule of the fucking law!

Consider the following sentences:

I do not believe that the meaning of the Constitution was forever “fixed” at the Philadelphia Convention. Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. 

That was from a speech in 1987.

That paragraph could also serve as some kind of a Rorschach test, I suppose, on how we think about the Constitution and the rule of law. How do you feel about that paragraph?

That excerpted paragraph is from a speech that Thurgood Marshall gave when he was serving as one of the nine in the US Supreme Court.  It was in the context of the bicentennial celebrations of the US Constitution.

Marshall refused to participate in those events.

 The focus of this celebration invites a complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the “more perfect Union” it is said we now enjoy.

A sitting member of the Supreme Court openly critiquing the Constitution.  And I had no idea about that all these years!

Marshall pulls no punches. Not even a bit.

What is striking is the role legal principles have played throughout America’s history in determining the condition of Negroes. They were enslaved by law, emancipated by law, disenfranchised and segregated by law; and, finally, they have begun to win equality by law. Along the way, new constitutional principles have emerged to meet the challenges of a changing society. The progress has been dramatic, and it will continue.
The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 could not have envisioned these changes. They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendant of an African slave. "We the People” no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers.

It continues to boggle my mind that Marshall's vacancy was filled by Clarence Thomas!  And even more mind-boggling that we have justices who believe that the Constitution's "original" intent ought to be interpreted, despite all the moral fatal flaws from which the laws been birthed.

We will see that the true miracle was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making, and a life embodying much good fortune that was not.

Of course, very little of such substance will be discussed and debated over the coming weeks of the Senate's consideration of the President's nominee for the Supreme Court.  As has become the standard practice, the nominee will pretty much refuse to answer any question.  The uber-conservative judge will be confirmed, and will help solidify the "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution.

Tell me again why the "rule of law" is so crucial?  Whose law, and whose rule?

Do white supremacists eat Mexican food?

There is certainly one thing that makes trump stand out from previous presidents--he keeps his campaign promises.

Remember Obama promising to close Gitmo on day one? Papa  Bush with his "read my lips; no new taxes"?

trump, on the other hand, campaigned as a racist and promised a lot on immigration.  63 million people loved his racism and voted him into the Oval Office.  The guy is coming through with one action after another, fulfilling his promises.

Thus, for instance, we have the crisis of children being separated at the border from their fathers and mothers.  If trump voters are now outraged, well, this is Faustian Bargain, and now the devil is collecting his dues.  Pay up, you fucking bastards!  trump never hid his cruelty!

The policy of shattering families and the cacophony of conservative voices defending it are the fruits of a campaign of dehumanization that began when Trump announced his candidacy for president, declaring that Mexico was sending rapists and drug dealers to migrate illegally to the United States.  ...
Dehumanizing “some” dehumanizes the whole. This has been Trump’s strategy from the beginning. It has been an essential element of the most shameful episodes in American history, a list to which the Trump administration’s policy of detaining children to frighten their parents must now be added.

Yep, it began with the very announcement that he was running for the presidency.  The fucking 63 million voters embraced this cruel and horrible human being!

Dehumanizing the "others" is not new in America.

The Trump administration’s purposeful separation of families has roused the ghosts that haunt America. In the antebellum United States, abolitionists seized on the separation of families by slave traders to indict the institution of slavery itself. Family separation was a key part of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which so affected some readers that, the historian Heather Andrea Williams writes in Help Me to Find My People, they went to slave auctions to bear witness: “Some travelers wanted to see for themselves the scenes that Stowe described in the novel, and they likened the people they saw to her characters.”
For the enslaved, who lived lives of toil and hardship as chattel, the forced division of families was among the most agonizing experiences they ever suffered or witnessed.

If you need to be reminded of that, check out 12 years a slave, which that essay also refers to.

To preserve the political and cultural preeminence of white Americans against a tide of demographic change, to keep America more white and less brown, the Trump administration has settled on a policy of systemic child abuse intended to intimidate prospective immigrants into submission.

It is the white supremacists' power play, all over again.

Trump’s harsh policies are the product of his view that Latin American immigrants will “infest” the U.S., changing the character of the country. It is a racialized view of citizenship, one that perceives white Americans as the nation’s rightful inheritors and the rest of us as interlopers. It is a worldview both antithetical to the American creed and inseparable from its execution.

Jamelle Bouie echoes many of these observations.

President Trump sees all Hispanic immigrants—and not just MS-13—as “animals” threatening the cultural and racial integrity of the United States.

The 63 million voters, including past commenters and some of my neighbors, can claim all they want that they are not racists.  But, racists they undeniably are.

I have been telling friends and family that things will way worsen and that we are yet to hit rock bottom.  Bouie says the same:

This will only get worse as November approaches and the president fights to hold a Republican majority in Congress. To energize its voters, the White House plans a campaign of vicious demagoguery.

Yep, even more vicious than how things are now, if one can imagine such a scenario!

It was always clear Trump would lean on racism to try to win the midterms. What’s now apparent is the shape and scope of that appeal. In 2015, when he kicked off his campaign by calling immigrants “rapists” and drug dealers, Trump also tried to give himself a sheen of plausible deniability: “Some, I assume, are good people.” But in 2018, he intends an unvarnished message of brutality and dehumanization; a white-supremacy campaign for the 21^st century.

Oxford Blues

The title of this essay in the NY Times magazine immediately drew me to it: A Lynching’s Long Shadow.

A few descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, who was lynched by a mob in 1935, try to learn about what happened back in Mississippi.  Higginbotham was "one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas."

The essay's timing is not any random occurrence.  Thanks to Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, "the country’s first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice" has opened in Montgomery, Alabama.  As Stevenson puts it:

We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.   

Perhaps the current president would shrug his shoulders and exclaim that there were fine people on both sides.  He would even fault the late Higginbotham for having brought this upon himself!  Other than him and his 63 million voters, the rest of us want to honestly engage with this dark past and reconcile.

Stevenson points to the German experience on truth and reconciliation:

“In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Stevenson said. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century.”

It is a shame that we do not have a national museum on slavery.  It is a disgrace that we do not even want to engage in honest discussions on this "original sin."  Discussions that can, once and for all, lead to reconciliation instead of the continuing simmering of those issues. 

In the essay, I came across a reference to a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, “Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone.”  I searched for and read it on a website, and will wrap up this post with that poem:

Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone
By Birago Diop

Those who are dead are never gone:
They are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the tree that rustles,
they are in the wood that groans,
they are in the water that sleeps,
they are in the hut,
they are in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never gone,
they are in the breast of the woman,
they are in the child who is wailing
and in the firebrand that flames.
The dead are not under the earth:
they are in the fire that is dying,
they are in the grasses that weep,
they are in the whimpering rocks,
they are in the forest,
they are in the house,
the dead are not dead.

At the Whitney Plantation

The big uneasy

(I will send a final version of this to the editor)
*********************************************

The annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which was held in New Orleans in early April, was an opportunity to further my understanding of slavery. Despite my intellectual explorations into understanding slavery and its continuing impacts on life in America, I, like many, have a tough time wrapping my head around the notion that human beings were bought and sold over many decades, and treated worse than animals. In this venture, The Big Easy, as New Orleans is referred to, was far from being easy.

After the United States banned transatlantic slave trading in 1808, the domestic trading and forcible relocation of human beings became even more important for the Deep South, whose cotton and sugarcane economy depended on slave labor. As in Solomon Northup's story, which was brought to life in the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave,” even free men were kidnapped from the north and brought to the plantations in the South.

Northup was one of the more than 100,000 humans who were bought and sold in New Orleans, including in the French Quarter, which is now one of the well-recognized tourist spots for food and music. While most of the city, including the French Quarter, even now lacks public memorialization of this dark past, there is at least one plaque—at the intersection of Esplanade and Chartres—that reminds us about the very spot where Northup was sold.

We as a country have never truly come to terms with the true horrors of the buying and selling of human beings and the atrocious treatment of slaves and, therefore, the racial dimensions of contemporary America. Perhaps that is also why we do not have a national museum dedicated to slavery, even though we have national museums devoted to many other aspects of American life.

Thanks to the personal commitment and financial backing from a New Orleans attorney— John Cummings—the Whitney Plantation, located about 30 miles outside New Orleans, is now a museum that is focused on slavery and the lives and deaths of slaves. The plantation was started in 1752, and later became one of the most profitable sugar manufacturers and exporters, with the slave labor working in sub-human conditions in the fields. Visiting the museum, which was opened to the public in 2015, was a painful reminder of the violence and brutality of the institution of slavery.

In this context, a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) should worry us all. The report notes that our schools are not dealing with the “hard history” of slavery. In its research, the SPLC found that “high school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions.” It is always tempting, of course, to speed through the awful past and to spend more time on heroes and heroic moments. But, who we are today is not disconnected from the ugliness of the past.

Here in Eugene and in Oregon, we are no exception. Behind the reputation of Oregon as a deep-blue progressive state lies the undeniable fact that not too long ago it was a crime for blacks to be merely present here. Far removed from the Deep South, and yet Oregon along with Indiana had the highest per-capita membership of its population in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

A couple of years ago, I went to the Mims House in downtown Eugene, after reading about it in this newspaper. When CB and Annie Mims came to Eugene seventy years ago, they could not find housing within the city because black families were not allowed to live within the “whites only” city limits. Eventually, the Mims were able to buy property on the “other side” of the river.

Now a monument of historical importance, the Mims House provided safe boarding and lodging to blacks who were denied services in town. The long list of notables who stayed there includes Louis Armstrong, who was born and raised in New Orleans. The Mims House was the only place where people like Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald could stay when they came here to perform. The echoes of slavery and racism were heard loud and clear across the continent, even here in Eugene!

As the SPLC notes, teaching and learning about slavery “requires often-difficult conversations about race and a deep understanding of American history. Learning about slavery is essential if we are ever to come to grips with the racial differences that continue to divide our nation.” This is a difficult conversation that all of us ought to be engaged in, whether it is in the Big Easy or in Eugene.