This Land is (Not) Your Land: America's Twinned Original Sin

A beheaded Christopher Columbus statue in Boston. Image from Robin Lubbock/WBUR.

I was going to release this as an odd column because I’ve been thinking about it since I put up the piece about police abolition and reform, but the week got away from me. I need to add something to that, because I think it’s essential: even if everything I outlined in my ideal scenario were to happen right now, there would still be further work to do, because the dysfunctional system of policing is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

The cause – and the historic root of the lion’s share, if not all, problems with America – is white supremacy. The belief in some essential hierarchy of human worth is obviously the problem. It’s why White Europeans stole land from Native Americans. It’s why we imported slave labor from Africa.

I was going to put a picture of Leopold II of Belgium, one of History’s greatest monsters, here. I decided to go with this picture, where the people of Gent gave him his due (taken from Brussels Times.)

The Americas were one of the laboratory for the development of these attitudes – the loss of the American colonies spurred the settling of Australia, and European colonialism didn’t start in Africa until the 19th century. The only other place where this could be said to have started was India, with the Dutch, Portuguese, and English transformed Early Modern Imperial rule to early Capitalist Colonial control.

I don’t know enough about India to really comment. I’m trying to educate myself more. Let me focus on America.

The slavery of black Africans – the eradication of culture, language, and religions of these people and the imposition of white European culture – is one of the twin original sins of the United States, the other being the genocide of the Native Americans. The one would not have been truly possible without the other, and so they will remain forever entangled. This was the inauguration of White supremacy.

Being “raised Catholic” mostly means I was taken into this building twice a week and zoned out for an hour. But some things soaked in.

I use the framing of Original Sin because I was raised Catholic, and I feel that it is an effective model for my part in the White supremacist culture that I was raised in (and that my parents were raised in, and their parents, back to the time when we first set foot on this continent.) I did not choose it, I do not want it, but I am – at least in part – responsible for it, and it is only through a regular practice of striving against it that I can justify my part in history by my works (the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith never made much sense to me.)

Habitually, one of the things that is brought up to silence discussion of white supremacy is reference to the experience of Irish and Italian immigrants in the United States. This is an ahistorical line of argument and merely a silencing tactic: at the time of those experiences, neither Irish nor Italian people were considered white. This is because “whiteness” isn’t actually a thing: it is constantly defined and redefined merely in opposition to other things. Have pride in your Irish, your Italian, your German, your Scottish, your Croatian or whatever roots – but be aware that there is no such thing as “whiteness”. Blackness was created by the shared trauma of the African people brought over against their will and terrorized in such a way that they were welded together. No comparable experience exists for white Americans.

Nothing I have written here, however, is necessarily new. While many of you may guess that this is our position, it needs to be stated: Black Lives Matter. I will not attach a list of associated causes that we believe in, I’ll make other posts at other times for those, because it needs to be stated right now, that Black Lives Matter.

What to Do About It

White leftists who don’t read Black leftists: what are you doing? I’m late to the party, but I’m doing my best to show up. There’s still a lot to discuss, but I don’t think the importance of White Supremacy in the conversation is debatable.

Look, if I knew how to solve this, I wouldn’t have to pay for my own hosting. And I don’t want to talk over Black voices – I picked up an ebook of Huey Newton’s writing, and I think that you all should find black writers and thinkers that you’re interested in and put them in your own personal canon.

However, I have a suggestion – probably not to kill white supremacy, but to wound it at the very least. My thinking is that people need to do to America what was done to South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s: we need to continue to agitate domestically, and the solidarity protests overseas are nice – but what I think people all over the world should be doing is agitating for their governments to divest from the United States.

The flow of arms from the United States probably can’t be stopped – but our friends overseas can probably harm the bottom line of American corporations enough that our bought-and-paid-for ruling class might just notice. Perhaps the Republican party can be made to drop the Southern Strategy, perhaps we might get some Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of our own.

I’m not going to gaslight myself into thinking that this can solve the problem, but I do think that this can be – potentially – a tool in the struggle.

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