In midst of the furor over Geraldine Ferraro’s unfortunate comments about Barack Obama, I read this fascinating post (via) about the history of lynching that’s been unearthed and compiled. The pride that lynchers had in their crimes is disturbing, but had the side effect of leaving a historical record that has been used to build a picture of what motivated communities to lynch this person but not that person. The discovery of the common thread behind many lynchings is telling.
And the terrible, but fascinating, bit of secret history turned out to be the immediate aftermath of over half of those lynchings. Over half of those lynchings turned out to involve black men who owned their own successful farms and/or businesses. And the day after the lynchings, those farms and businesses were sold to white neighbors, in closed auctions, for pennies on the dollar, and the surviving real heirs were run out of town. And in a terrifyingly large number of those cases, historians were able to show one or more of the following facts. The buyer was the person who made the initial accusation against the victim. And the buyer was a relative of one or more of the following: the mayor, the chief of police, the local minister and/or the municipal judge.
One thing that gets lost in a lot of the examination of how people get into the extreme hate zone is how they personally benefit, at least in their own perceptions. Part of it is the discourse around ideology in the U.S., where direct interests are considered a bit gauche to discuss. Or, at least that’s the impression I get when I talk about how a lot of the anti-choice noise stems directly from people that lost an entitlement when the market for adoptable white babies dried up. It’s a tad low to accuse your opponents of having mercenary motivations, but what if they do?
Racism is a much more manageable social evil if we believe it’s nothing but an irrational hatred. If it’s just a bunch of people who hate because they’re crazy, then we can shun them and continue to be racist in our own ways, with the excuse that we’re just rational about it. Which is why there’s such a problem explaining to people why this tide of anti-immigrant sentiment is so racist, because it doesn’t resemble the racism they were taught about in schools, the racism that’s largely a myth. We’re taught that racism was this irrational superstition that Dr. King saved us all from with his rational speechifying. And anti-immigrant sentiment has all these arguments for it, about jobs and language and all sorts of things. Totally different.
But of course, racism is a system that has real, tangible benefits for the dominant race, as this lynching example shows. And the excuses offered to create the illusion of moral righteousness for the troops of enforcers always exist. Back then, the motivation was economic, and the excuse was the purity of white women that was rumored to be contaminated by the black men who owned valuable property that was then sold off for pennies on the dollar to the white accusers. Now we have the prison-industrial economic boondoggle that’s defended on the grounds that drugs are bad, to the same effect of destabilizing black families and communities. When it was revealed who the terrorists were on 9/11, I couldn’t help but think this was a racist’s dream—so often, you have to make up crimes committed by members of the group holding power over economic assets you want to grab. That the powers that be had actual Muslims to finger as terrorists meant that they had all the excuse they need to go on a crazy power grab over some of the world’s most expensive assets, with the forces of racism behind them. The lynchers of old just had to make shit up.
This is why, in the end, I find myself ashamed and sick of feminists who are dismissive of Obama’s campaign, pulling stunts like Ferraro’s comment. Yes, it would be a big deal to elect a female President, but it’s also a big deal to elect a black President, and to be dismissive of the latter while upholding the former requires one to ignore a whole shitload of historical and continuing oppression. Either way, anti-oppression forces get a victory. Why do we have to fight for scraps on this?
Lynchings are all too often held up as a sort of “that was then” example, but this revelation that it was all about economics shows how much things haven’t changed. From the get-go, black Americans have been viewed by white Americans as a way to generate wealth and power that we could then take without sharing with those who generated it. With that in mind, having a black American hold the highest office in the land, holding real, honest-to-god power in a very visible role that others couldn’t mistake, is no small thing at all.
49 Responses to “Just follow the money”
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Which is why there’s such a problem explaining to people why this tide of anti-immigrant sentiment is so racist, because it doesn’t resemble the racism they were taught about in schools, the racism that’s largely a myth.
That makes a lot of sense to me — it’s probably the reason it took me a while to understand the arguments that such a large part of this recent anti-immigration sentiment is racist.
How much of this mythologization of history do you suppose we can really avoid, though? I’ve seen people make the similar complaints about science education, that science is portrayed as a series of right and obvious answers to questions. People who don’t learn about the process have trouble recognizing when there’s science going on, since “science” to them just means a bunch of facts. This strikes me as analogous to your complaint about the standard narrative about racism.
A lot of Anti-Semitism is economic in nature, or why the huge focus on Jewish attitudes about money?
Anti-feminism often has the same roots. “If we pay them the same as men, then men won’t get paid enough or will have to take crappier jobs.”
My parents lived in Richmond, California during WWII. My father said that a major reason for the internment of Japanese was to get their businesses and land. It was an open secret.
While economics is rarely the simple zero-sum game many treat it as, there are real consequences to treating people equally, especially when you’re one of those people who knows he’s not going to measure up to most members of the underclass come the revolution.
This is a very interesting bit of history, and it helps certain things make sense.
I remember arguing with my freshman English teacher - long, long time ago - about the causes of racism. It was after we’d read To Kill a Mockingbird. The only “correct” answer to the question of what caused racism was “ignorance.” There was this definite notion that if everyone simply knew more about other races, then racism would disappear. I disagreed because it seemed like there were plenty of people who weren’t ignorant, but who were very racist. I didn’t really have the tools or the knowledge to argue my case well enough back then, but I knew that was an incomplete answer. (I wish I could say I remember this because I was a racially enlightened teenager, but in truth, I’ve always been pissed off that I got a “C” on that paper.)
The current round of racial tensions with the two campaigns has much to do with economic tensions, as well. Obama represents a real threat to the old guard of the Democratic party, and the traditional paths of power and money in Washington.
I think the “market for white babies” is only a small part of the anti-choice movement’s motivation.
I think there is a far bigger “market for economically dependent women” out there. If you keep her barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, she can’t leave you, no matter what you do.
You also have the Catholic Church, who claims to be infallible. This means that they can never change their mind on any moral issue without compromising the justification for their own existence.
Many of the same things can be said about right wing evangelical churches. And don’t think there isn’t a “market for religious leaders.”
This post is amazing. Bravo.
What do you think the Salem witch trials were about? Someone researched and made a map of the property of the accused witches. It turns out that they all had prime land in the town (a rare thing at that time when they didn’t have good technology to make farmlands) and though they were wealthy, they didn’t belong to the inner circle of church elders. Meanwhile, the girls accusing the witches were of low social class, but suddenly got a lot of prestige and support when they started acting out.
Nope, no motives there. Not at all. Salem was totally just mass hysteria. Or ergot poisoning. Right.
I found this post to be very profound. Thank you.
Profound indeed, well said. Don’t miss KO’s Special Comment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa6dCUWocbs
My parents lived in Richmond, California during WWII. My father said that a major reason for the internment of Japanese was to get their businesses and land. It was an open secret.
I found out long after my grandfather died why our family dentist, who was Japanese, never seemed to send us much of a bill.
Seems that his father, also a dentist, was facing a loss of his clinic property and practice. My grandfather, who had traded carpentry for dental work on a number of occasions purchased the property for a small sum. When they were released, he sold it back to them for the costs of maintaining the property.
I know most of the purchasers were rank opportunists, but this makes me wonder if there were a few like my grandfather who merely stewarded the properties and avoided paying large sums lest they be considered sympathizers at a critical time.
Oh, and one thing about Ferraro - she seems to have real problems with the whole multi-racial thing. Total cognitive dissonance if you read her stupid. It’s like she thinks that it is all a marketing gimmick or novelty or something, not the increasing percentage of the population - particularly the younger VOTING population - that it is.
I guess she can’t slate younger multi-racial voters or even Obama into any given voting bloc and that drives her boomerbrain just totally nuts.
Keith Olbermann can have my babies any time.
Indeed. Whenever the answer is in doubt, just follow the money. It’ll lead you right to what you want to know.
Ms Kate:
I’m sure there were a lot more than we’ll ever know about.
The problem is that stories like these break the narrative that both sides of the ideological divide want to construct. On the one side, you have the “anyone who isn’t a white male heterosexual Christian is a threat to national security,” and on the other side you have “racism is a form of gibbering irrationality.” Both narratives forget that we’re always going to be talking about actual human beings, most of whom don’t give a fig about geopolitics and are just trying to survive.
I’m not saying that these stories are actively suppressed. Not all the time, anyways; there is certainly an active revisionist history industry, about Japanese internment or anything else you’d care to name. But in politics, the first casualty is always the truth.
Wayward, both are true, but it’s shocking how much hardcore anti-choice sentiment stems back to the adoption issue. It’s worth remembering, for instance, that the Bushes had trouble conceiving and were trying to adopt (unsuccessfully) when they conceived the twins.
Yeah, fantastic post.
Bravo, Amanda! After a long day at grad school I finally get to hear somebody make some sense.
The Ferraro thing really got under my skin because she was right in the stupidest way possible. Yep, Obama wouldn’t be where he is if he were a woman or white. That’s because so much of the great things about him, his candidacy, his politics, and his vision of/for our country has to do with his experiences as a multiracial, multinational, lower-class dude with a funny name. His superb self-awareness flows directly from it–that’s the take home lesson from his autobiography. I can’t quite figure out why that means I shouldn’t vote for him…
I don’t remember what grade I was in, but one of the years I studied American history in public school, the textbook actually bothered to point out that the arguments in support of slavery shifted from largely economic in colonial times to the increasingly religious and “scientific” in the years leading up the the civil war.
I don’t remember the textbook putting it quite this way, but I do remember thinking that it was as if, once that type of economic avarice was no longer considered acceptable, there was this massive attempt at misdirection. “No, no, forget about property rights vs. human rights for the moment, and focus on all this stuff that has nothing to do with money. That’s why we really support slavery.”
Yeah, right. Supporting one group’s right to own other people has nothing at all to do with economics. And I’m sure that all the white sharecroppers that fought for the Confederate States did so because they believed in states rights deeply enough to feel it necessary to sacrifice everything, and not at all or on any level because they were afraid of being able to keep their children fed if they had to compete with newly freed slaves for land and crop prices.
Confusing the issue even more is that a lot of that misdirection is for the benefit of one’s self. So when you try and point out the underlying reasons why the culture and people act the way they do, people get either really confused or really defensive - often both.
The stuff I hear some of my family members say re: the large hispanic population in SoCal is insane. The same people that complain about junk mail and skip over TV ads are suddenly mortally insulted when they go to a theatre and the ads are in Spanish or bilingual, or when the billboard on the freeway is as well. They are like little kids that can’t stand to watch other people play with the toys they don’t really want anymore. My god, how dare someone that isn’t them be considered important enough to be subjected to annoying advertising as well! I especially love it when they say “but it just annoys me that I don’t know what it says!” As if it’s really all that difficult to figure out a Mickey D’s billboard in any language, much less one that you use to when ordering from several other fast food places on a regular basis.
And yet, of course, none of this has to do with economics or political power. No siree. All this use of Spanish instead of (or even with!) English by private companies is just amorphously wrong somehow.
Yeah, some of the later “witches” were well off, like Philip English and John Alden. But it didn’t start out that way. The first ones accused were Tituba (a slave) Sarah Goode (a begger) and Sarah Osborne (a woman who had a dubious history). It often begins by targeting the poorer women, the outcast and the socially questionable, and then works its way up, just like abortion today.
As long as we’re pointing out other areas in history where this happened, the Nuremburg Laws were a huge economic boon to the early Nazi economy. First they took all of the Jews’ money and property, then they turned them into slave labor, and when they couldn’t bleed any more money or labor out of the remaining Jews, they started killing them wholesale.
Same thing happened in Canada. Another American example is what happened to cause the “Trail of Tears”. It was all about grabbing the resources of the Cherokee who, contrary to expectations of what “real” Indians should be like, were succeeding in the (then) modern economy under their own terms.
And mnemosyne:
One minor correction. There was always a conflict between three groups in the Nazi hierarchy: the ones who didn’t particularly care if the Jews lived or died so long as the most economic gain could be squeezed out of them; the ones who wanted them dead after squeezing what they could out of them; and the ones who wanted them dead and damn the economics.
The latter two were in the majority and the conflict between their points of view is a constant theme when you look at documents from the era. You had memos and letters from people concerned with production complaining about the louts killing off the slave workers, and the louts in turn writing memos and letters complaining about how the bean-counters were only concerned with money instead of the goal of a Judenfrei nation.
Great post.
In Poland a number of Jews were killed after the war when they came back and tried to reclaim their property. Lots of people who weren’t Nazis were more than happy to have the opportunity to grab other people’s nice things, and didn’t want to give it back.
Ms Kate - there were people who did that, and there were others who maintained property for Japanese friends (that is, taking over their business or farms) so it wouldn’t be destroyed or stolen while they were interned. They weren’t the majority.
There was a really interesting film on my local PBS station the other week about cities and counties around the turn of the last century that flat-out expelled their black populations. As with lynchings, there were land grabs and other property seizures.
The filmmaker talks to descendants of the families that were expelled and descendants of the white families that benefited. There is a profound unwillingness on the part of almost all the white people to acknowledge that the banishments even took place and that the land was not just abandoned for no reason. That gets back to this idea that racism is just a personal, ignorant hatred for other races - If I’m standing next to a black person, talking to him, and I don’t feel hate, then I’m not racist.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/banished/index.html
The other money trail to follow is who is doing shit jobs for too little money. When the legislation that established the first public welfare programs was debated, Southern legislators complained on the floor of House and Senate, that if the government made welfare available to blacks, there would be nobody to iron their shirts. They didn’t even bother to pretty it up with any language about personal responsibility. That would come later.
Fast forward to the mid-90s. A record low unemployment rate is making it hard to fill good jobs, much less crappy ones. What do we get? An end to welfare as we know it. And other than “They’re taking our jobs,” what’s the next biggest concern about illegal immigrants? They’re sucking up social services that should go to Americans. The TANIF legislation in the 90s made it much, much harder than it already was for even legal immigrants to qualify for any welfare benefits. I’m sure that new emphasis had nothing to do with immigrants doing a lot of the agricultural labor and housecleaning and care-giving work that was done by blacks in the first half of the last century.
This was the sort of thing (much of racism is fueled by avarice and greed) that eventually led me to try out the notion that, collectively, white people suffered more from racism than others. While the minorities and women get some of those spectacular beating, rapings, lynchings, etc…the end result was to foster a growth of much more malvolent white leadership than there otherwise would be, and a much greater tolerance for high crime and general brutality.
Let go of that idea because I never really pulled the dots closer together with more research and clearer thinking.
I think Amanda is shining in the right direction, i.e., a major aspect of race in america is that there are *many* such “open season on minorities” deals between various white people, and one of the reasons why race is allowed to be verbotten in public discourse is to prevent people from having to think about what they were *really* doing to people. Think of that dinner party near the end of The Wire, where Marlo interacts with all the white people who expects to profit off of him. One of the marvelous little unstated points of the show is how much people can cream off of a city of people. Even a desperately poor place, with enough people, can represent a crop for the various slumlords, drug dealers, drug shippers, lawyers, developers, and the like…
Thing is, I, as a black person, tend to think there are a LOT of white people who have taken advantage of these little “open season” gigs at one point or another, and knowingly so…
Yeah, right. Supporting one group’s right to own other people has nothing at all to do with economics.
“We’re liberating the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein”…
The disputes in NZ were over land - it’s a bit more difficult to hide the fact that you’re engaged in stealing when trying to evict the wogs out of their homes. Especially when the wogs have laywers and a treaty on their side.
I just wanted to come on and add to this that, of course, there’s more than one kind of racism, and people can go in and out of experiencing feelings and ideas that are racist throughout fairly complex lives. That’s not to excuse it, just to point out that the racism that society approves and foments against rising or wealthy members of a “foreign” or “dangerous” or “uppity” race/class isn’t the same racism that society draws on to protect power later. Institutional racism protects one set of power relationships while cultural racism can continue to exist and bubble along in the absence of those power relationships.
I guess what I mean by that is that the white hierarchy in the south (and north) used institutional racism and jim crow to preserve a supine working class after reconstruction. They used cultural racism as a way of splitting the white working class/red necks off of their natural allies the black working class. During and after civil rights and in the death throes of de jure racism cultural racism and fears of black poverty and images of black otherness were used, very cynically, to get votes from white property owners (I’m drawing on a book called Canarsie for this analysis) simply to create and control whites as a conservative voting bloc.
Does anyone really think, for example, that bush et al give a flying F*&& about liberating women in burkas in afghanistan? Or, conversely, that they are really afraid of some guy with a butcher knife in an Iraqi slum? Or that these two images of a racialized “other” are identical? They aren’t–but they are both used to garner votes. The racism of the first one (help the poor brown women! Let the Iraqi people vote…etc…etc…etc…) is utterly different from the racism of the other (the kind of swarthy piratical guy with a knife image that makes you look under your bed and sleep with a gun) but they both serve the same function in keeping conservative guys and militarism at the top of our society.
Racism has many faces, many purveyors, and many lives.
aimai
I’ll put all the links in one comment, for one-stop moderation.
The go-to guy for info on these matters is Orcinus. His book Stawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community really lays out the economic motives behind internment.
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen explores the growth of “Whites Only” towns in the US. Loewen’s website includes a database where he is collecting information on sundown towns and local history.
Follow the money is right. I may be an unreconstructed cynic, but I think the whole Ferraro thing was scripted. This is how it works:
1) Plant (or reinforce) the idea that Barack Obama is an “affirmative action” candidate for President that has an “unfair advantage”.
2) When (rightly) called on stupidity, repeat point A, and admit that (to a lesser extent) it applies to yourself as well. (Anyone who knows anything about affirmative action quota systems knows that the primary beneficiaries are white women).
3) Make sure the message goes viral, and get it pointed toward Pennsylvania, a blue collar state that assuredly has a wealth of former skilled laborers and others who are currently struggling, and all have “friends of friends or acquaintances” who “were denied job opportunities because of a “g**d****d n****r” who “didn’t deserve the job” because he “didn’t work as hard”.
Yeah, kiddies, this was definitely a rational, thought out act by the Clinton campaign. It’s old school dog whistling, and it’s incredibly effective.
Slavery’s direct heir is our prison system today, which didn’t exist to any significant extent until after slavery was abolished. Chain gangs were not incidental to, but the point of, the prison system. And today is worse with the prison-industrial system becoming increasingly powerful.
This is one of many articles and books detailing our prison system’s roots in slavery.
epistemology,
YOu are reminding me that of a fantastic essay I read, years ago, about the use of vagrancy laws on (white and non white) “hobos” to create a mobile work force. Basically the police would pick up drifters, alcholics and vagrants, arrest them, lease them out to farmers for day labor for a short period of time, then release them and put them back on the trains out of town when the picking season was done.
aimai
It’s a tad low to accuse your opponents of having mercenary motivations, but what if they do?
It’s not ‘low’ if it’s also true. I wouldn’t worry about that part. Hell, neither racists nor antichoicers have any compunction whatsoever about accusing us of anything, true or untrue. Keep that in mind.
“There was a really interesting film on my local PBS station the other week about cities and counties around the turn of the last century that flat-out expelled their black populations. As with lynchings, there were land grabs and other property seizures.”
James Loewen wrote a really interesting (but not as well written as his other books) about this topic called “Sundown Towns.”
It’s a real light bulb goes off moment for being a white guy from a tiny town with almost no black people. He uses census data that shows that black people had moved to almost everywhere as soon as they were free to in the country not long after the Civil War. Then, as we got further from reconstruction and the civil war, the number of all-white counties started growing. Black people were pushed out of communities across the country, sometimes violently.
If I’d thought about it, I’d have said where I grew up, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, never had a more than nominal black population, but according to Loewen, it was one of the areas that apparently drove out its black population around the turn of the century. I guess my unexamined assumption was that black people chose not to move to places like the U.P. or North Dakota, not that they moved there in some numbers, lived for a while, and were thrown out.
Richard Wright gives a heartbreaking example of this in Black Boy. His uncle was lynched by whites who coveted his flourishing bar. The uncle, with whom Wright was living at the time, was the only prosperous member of Wright’s family; Wright’s brief sojourn with his uncle was his only respite from the poverty and hunger that plagued his childhood.Bootstraps, my ass.
How would you like to be Billy B Dumb@ass and realize that the Messicans work harder for less? Lots of labor employers went Messican because they showed up for work, showed up sober, and worked. No more whitetrash welfare.
Slavery was economic. One could not be a planter without the “free” labor of slaves. One could employ workers as did the Northeast owners, but their houses are much smaller and less ornate.
Excellent post.
KeithM said:
There was always a conflict between three groups in the Nazi hierarchy: the ones who didn’t particularly care if the Jews lived or died so long as the most economic gain could be squeezed out of them; the ones who wanted them dead after squeezing what they could out of them; and the ones who wanted them dead and damn the economics.
This seems like a common dynamic in societies that hit the tipping point and launch full-scale ethnic cleansing or genocide: the instigating group is almost always a coalition of hardcore ethnic nationalists and opportunists, and the conflicts between them often end up being a real drag on the coalition’s efficiency.
You can see the same dynamic at work in the modern Republican party, between the social conservatives and the plutocrats: the first actually want women and minorities in chains as a matter of principle, while the latter are only interested in this as a way of securing cheap, compliant labor. The disconnect between Wall Street and the megachurches when they actually sit down to work out an agenda on other issues has all the same markers as the dynamics in 1930s Germany that you describe… including, of course, the sizable group in the middle committed to pleasing both God and Mammon.
James Loewen wrote a really interesting (but not as well written as his other books) about this topic called “Sundown Towns.”
As someone else has already pointed this book out as well (Dr. Science), I’d also like to add my two cents.
I actually met Loewen on the metro I think was about a year ago and we talked about this book. It was one of the most interesting experiences of my life, not only because of the insight Loewen shared with me (I was completely unaware of the size of this trend) but also because of the conversation that occurred after he left the train.
At the time we were going through some large African-American suburbs in DC and understandably there were African-Americans somewhat amused by my complete shock over the overt racism going on in supposedly “progressive” parts of the country. (In my defense, I’m from Hawaii so I did essentially just fall off the turnip truck.) After Loewen left the train I continued to have a conversation (in the sense that they talked and I asked a few questions) with several of the other passengers on the train about how unique it was to have a racially integrated community at all in the United States.
I think Loewen points out one of the most insidious ways in which race has crept into our national heritage and as such should be required reading for anyone over the age of 10.
I don’t remember the textbook putting it quite this way, but I do remember thinking that it was as if, once that type of economic avarice was no longer considered acceptable, there was this massive attempt at misdirection. “No, no, forget about property rights vs. human rights for the moment, and focus on all this stuff that has nothing to do with money. That’s why we really support slavery.”
I often got that sense in history classes, too.
Years ago, I saw a documentary with some economic historians arguing that slavery supporters couldn’t be in it for the money because, long-term, a slave-based economy is non-sustainable and has to eventually collapse. (I can’t hunt for the resources at work–is anyone else familiar with this argument and its current acceptance?) I wonder if this argument might be some of the reason behind the “whitewashing” kind of feeling in the textbook.
In the context of this post, it seems pretty clear that individuals aren’t necessarily aware of their macro-economic status and could only see the immediate loss of wealth and power that threatened. Amanda also points out the loss of privilige, and I think it’s hard to put a value on “I get to order other people around” in economic terms. If the argument is correct and the Southern slave economy was already heading towards collapse, it’s also very possible that the Southerners who felt the initial tremors blamed the abolitionists, the free blacks, and even the slaves themselves for the troubles in the economy. Scapegoats are always profitable.
Of course, Amanda has often pointed out something that I had never thought of: our whole US economy relies on the unpaid labor of the “housewife”, and I have to wonder how economists consider that kind of unpaid labor when they study slave economies.
Speaking of the prison system as slavery’s direct heir, it’s remarkable how similar the current “war on drugs” is to Amanda’s comments on lynching. Drug laws disproportionately target minorities and when somebody is convicted of “dealing” (whether or not that’s actually what they were doing) their assets are confiscated. It would be really interesting to see a full breakdown of how much money is being made between the confiscation itself and the auctioning of those assets at bargain prices. But I’m guessing that a full accounting is not likely to be forthcoming any time soon.
If anyone has watched any of the African-American Lives series by Henry Louis Gates, it’s very striking how many of the families he researches had, in the years immediately after slavery ended, land, businesses, true economic independence, and how many of the families had that stolen from them outright or were intimidated out of it through threats of violence that had to be taken seriously. It’s also striking how many of their descendants knew nothing of this history, only the more recent family history of economic hard times.
When Henry Louis Gates asks Chris Rock what difference it would have made if he had known about his great-great- (great?)-grandfather, the former slave who also was a large landowner, state Senator and businessman before he was run out of town at the end of Reconstruction, Rocks says something like: It would have taken away the inevitability that my life would be carrying stuff for white people.
When it seems like everything seems to go wrong all the time for the people who look like you but you don’t know the reason, it can be really easy for children to internalize a suspicion that maybe there really is something wrong with them. As much as people on the right whine about a culture of victimization, so much of the real story has been suppressed that victims can be left with no one to blame but themselves. I’m Jewish, and I have occasionally heard a voice in my head that says: “Why have we always been so hated everywhere we’ve gone, throughout history? Maybe we really are that bad.” And that’s as someone who has never felt any real discrimination, just the occasional jackass telling me how the Jews run everything because they didn’t realize I was Jewish. How much louder, more insistent might that voice be in someone who has their inferior status constantly reinforced and their true history hidden from them?
And let’s not forget the “zero tolerance” seizure laws that let authorities take your car if they find so much as a single pot seed in it, and seize all sorts of other property if they want to assert you may have bought it with a penny of “drug money”. Different states have different rules as to who gets the booty, but usually the police departments get at least some of it, in some places all of it.
I remember driving around Florida seeing police in cars that actually had painted on the side of them “seized from a drug dealer”! And I thought, yeah, right, probably just some poor schmuck you caught smoking a joint. (And given racial disparities in arrests and convictions, it’s another way to get those goodies that those coloreds don’t really deserve, yes?)
Here in Louisiana we have a lovely system where “drug asset” forfeiture is split 60% to the cops, 20% to the DA, and 20% to the Criminal Court Fund. Doesn’t that sound ever-so-fair to the accused who tries to contest the seizure?
But the “drug war” is all about public health and values, uh-huh.
Especially when the wogs have laywers and a treaty on their side.
A lot of Native Americans had treaties, too. Didn’t do them a damn bit of good once the Army decided to march in and massacre everyone who wouldn’t move off the best farming land.
They had a good, if incredibly depressing, piece about Kit Carson in New Mexico on “The American Experience” on PBS and how he helped drive the Navajo off their land by destroying their orchards.
>Lots of labor employers went Messican because they showed up for work, showed up sober, and worked. No more whitetrash welfare.
I live in the Katrina Zone. My home was flooded and had to be gutted and renovated. Many, many Latinos came to work (and are still here). Not only Mexicans, but Hondurans, Salvadorans, Costa Ricans. To a man the Latinos showed up when they said they would, were sober and exceedingly polite, worked exactly eight hours, and took exactly one hour for lunch. Several spoke excellent English. I made sure to speak with them privately and make sure my general contractor was paying them adequately. In return they taught me a little Spanish. Now I can greet them, inquire as to their general well-being, and ask where the library is
Their work ethic was amazing, particularly compared to their Anglo counterparts. The quality of their work was excellent. And they were honest: the only incident of thievery in the house was committed by a local Anglo.
I will forever be grateful to these people for coming to help us. Sure they were paid for their trouble, but above all they came to help.
Now on-topic, I recall an NPR segment several years ago about the Wilmington NC race riot in 1898. It is recognized as the only coup d’etat on US soil. During that event the city government was overthrown, prosperous blacks were driven from the city and their property confiscated, and the Jim Crow era began in North Carolina.
Follow the money is right.
It is still worth reading Eric Williams’ book Capitalism and Slavery for his thesis about the relationship between economics and the ideologies of racism.
When the Jews were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, their property and goods were also seized. I remember learning about the land seizure aspect of Japanese internment in California, where I grew up, in college at Berkeley from a terrific professor, Elaine Kim, who taught a class on immigrant history.
The german case is interesting even in its aftermath — west germany paid reparations (not necessarily a lot) to jewish families whose property had been confiscated in the years after the war. The east german government declared the issue Not Their Problem. After reunification, property seized from both jews and non-jews in the east was either returned or paid for, with claims of expropriation by the Nazis trumping claims of expropriation by the communists.
There was a fair amount of resentment over the whole process, but often more visibly (at some points at least) against jewish claimants, who were considered to be “only in it for the money”. Because after all, none of the descendants would have the temerity to go back and live or work in the houses and businesses that had been seized.
aka, civil forfeiture. Which makes sense when you’ve already got somebody convicted of a crime–sorry, Mr. International Prostitution Ring, you don’t get to keep the yacht you bought by selling women as sex slaves–but in the War On Poor People’s Drugs, the government figured out very quickly that you don’t actually have to have a conviction.
See, “civil forfeiture” means that it’s a civil case, where the burden of proof is much lower. And if you’ve already seized people’s assets, why, they don’t have a lot of money to hire a lawyer to fight back! It’s a real eye-opener to read case after case where a “conservative” federal judge rules, in essence, “Yes this is kind of an abuse of the law, but, well, drugs!”
I think this was the first blog post I read (in 2004) where it was explicitly stated that a woman was “selfish” for deciding to have an abortion rather than carry triplets to term - requiring at minimum 4 months complete bed rest - and allow two out of the three to be adopted by strangers. A man claimed ot be upset because his sister longed to have a baby, couldn’t, and a woman who could, was both having a baby - and having an abortion.
I was just re-reading Miles Davis’ autobiography over lunch today, and in the first chapter he remarks about how his grandfather in Arkansas had acquired a lot of money working as a bookkeeper (primarily for white people). He was well-respected…
…until he used that money to buy a good-sized plot of land. Then he suddenly lost all his business and was run out of town.
So yeah, this idea makes perfect sense.
An aside: If you’ve never read Miles Davis’ autobiography, you really should.
WF
KeithM noted:
Even more specifically, it was the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia — on Cherokee land — that prompted the full Cherokee removal.
Dorothy,
I think it helped that I got really into Mark Twain in high school and read Huck Finn several times, and that I had to read Invisible Man at about the same time. Together they made it a lot easier to read between the lines of the textbooks and pick up on some of the understated commentary that makes it through the textbook selection process.
My alma mater - a woman’s college - had posters up in the library that said “Every time a girl reads a womanless history she learns she is worth less.”
Same general idea.
When certain people rail against multiculturalism and inclusiveness in schools, they are often laboring under the same poisonous presumptions that Chris Rock and all those other boys and girls were - that things have always been as they are now, except when they were worse.
That was my favorite part of reading Lies My Teacher Told Me; learning over and over again that by leaving certain things out of the history books, we don’t just get an incomplete or simplistic understanding of history, the lessons we learn end up being just plain wrong.
It’s something I kind of knew before hand, but I really knew it by the time I was done with that book.
“because it doesn’t resemble the racism they were taught about in schools…”
If you read the book White Flight by Kevin Kruse, you may change your mind on this one point. Constant references to “invaders” and allegations of low tax contributions are just two of the many similarities between the “old” racism and the current immigration vocabulary.