in the United States of America, there is a visceral reaction to the question...
Having exhausted ourselves in celebration of our declaration of national independence, we should reflect on how our history has brought us to our present day identity. And, beyond any doubt, our present day identity is that of a nation steeped in racism.
It is constantly suggested that improvement could come from our acknowledging the truth about ourselves, admitting to our crimes as they were and making sincere attempts at atonement. As it is, however, we refuse to accede to the truth of our history and we make every excuse conceivable to pretend a justification for our brutality against non-whites in every aspect of our past.
We have lots of accurate information about the relationship between the Europeans who came to this hemisphere and those not of European descent, but rather than recognize the truth, we habitually create a false mythology that masks the truth and results in dishonest and distorted versions of our history. Most people living in this country have no real idea of our history... no reliable information about who we are.
We are a country filled with hatred. We have a 'black' president and a senate that refuses to follow the laws of our country regarding relations between the executive office and the senate because the president is 'black'. We have politicians around the country who openly pray for the president to die (or be murdered) because the president is 'black'.
With all of the deafening noise about patriotism in this country, treason against a 'black' president is ok! There are many wishing against the United States simply as a wish to discredit a 'black' president.
There is no accomplishment, no amount of success in any field of endeavor, no degree of wealth that can make up for being 'black'. To be of any racial minority in this country, especially 'black' is, in the minds of many, the very 'lowest' a human-being can be.
That we run around in this country claiming to be 'post-racial' is an illness... it is delusional. We all know better, but want to believe that shouting it louder will make it come true.
We will never become 'post-racial' if we cannot honestly face the truth about our history and about who we are at present. Racism R us... and that's the truth !!!
It is constantly suggested that improvement could come from our acknowledging the truth about ourselves, admitting to our crimes as they were and making sincere attempts at atonement. As it is, however, we refuse to accede to the truth of our history and we make every excuse conceivable to pretend a justification for our brutality against non-whites in every aspect of our past.
We have lots of accurate information about the relationship between the Europeans who came to this hemisphere and those not of European descent, but rather than recognize the truth, we habitually create a false mythology that masks the truth and results in dishonest and distorted versions of our history. Most people living in this country have no real idea of our history... no reliable information about who we are.
We are a country filled with hatred. We have a 'black' president and a senate that refuses to follow the laws of our country regarding relations between the executive office and the senate because the president is 'black'. We have politicians around the country who openly pray for the president to die (or be murdered) because the president is 'black'.
With all of the deafening noise about patriotism in this country, treason against a 'black' president is ok! There are many wishing against the United States simply as a wish to discredit a 'black' president.
There is no accomplishment, no amount of success in any field of endeavor, no degree of wealth that can make up for being 'black'. To be of any racial minority in this country, especially 'black' is, in the minds of many, the very 'lowest' a human-being can be.
That we run around in this country claiming to be 'post-racial' is an illness... it is delusional. We all know better, but want to believe that shouting it louder will make it come true.
We will never become 'post-racial' if we cannot honestly face the truth about our history and about who we are at present. Racism R us... and that's the truth !!!
 |  |
Are You Ready for Some Hard Truths About the Birth of Our Nation?
Brace Yourself -- Cutting edge historians are breaking new ground to help us understand the dogged persistence of white racism.
By Frank Joyce / AlterNet
Ah, July 4th. Of all the national orgies of self-congratulation, militarism and, of course, shopping, this one stands out. Even more than, say, Memorial Day, it perfectly captures the combination of myths and ignorance that make up the fairy-tale view we hold of our national origins and character.
Better understanding our history is especially important to our ongoing struggle to come to terms with white racism. The truth is its roots run much deeper than most whites even begin to understand or acknowledge.
Fortunately, a new generation of scholars is bringing new research and perspective to our understanding of what really happened and therefore why white racism is so intractable. (A partial list of essential recent books appears at the end of this article.)
What most of us think the Declaration of Independence says is this and only this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But there was much more to the Declaration than those famous words. Far more attention was dedicated to a long list of grievances that the founding fathers had with the King. One of them was that the British were in cahoots with, “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Another complaint which didn’t make it into the Declaration but was included in a precursor document, the Virginia Constitution, complained that the British were “prompting our Negroes to rise in arms against us…”
The first slaves arrived in what is now the United States in 1619. By the late 1700s, they were already a critical component of the economy and of the political conversation that led to the conflict with England.
So much so that historian Gerald Horne poses a radical reinterpretation of the founding of the nation’s origins, in his trailblazing book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776. “Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state,” he writes.
Citing previously ignored evidence, Horne argues convincingly that a combination of alarm over the growing abolition sentiment in Britain, well underway by the late 1700s, and the deep-rooted fear of potential British support for slave uprisings were major motivating forces behind the desire for “independence” in the first place.
Sally E. Hadden advances that argument as well in her book Slave Patrols—Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas:
"By the mid-1770s, incessant rumors calculated that the British would not merely incite the slaves to revolt, but would go so far as to arm them against their white masters. As early as 1774, the Virginian Arthur Lee read a pamphlet in London which suggested that the patriots might not go to war if their slaves were inspired to revolt against them. Likewise, James Madison thought a bill freeing slaves had been introduced in Parliament although no such bill has ever been located. This type of volatile gossip spread with lightning speed. In May 1775 the South-Carolina Gazette printed a letter from London in which the writer speculated that the English government had sent 78,000 guns to America to ‘put into the hands of N*****s.'"
And indeed, notwithstanding the legend of Crispus Attucks, a black man, as the first pro-independence casualty of the revolution, most African-Americans and indigenous people who fought at all fought on the side of the British. And why not? Nothing was to be gained for them in transferring power from the King of England to the white property owners of the colonies, many of whom were slave-owners or otherwise profiting from the slave trade.
Thomas Jefferson himself said as much in his account of the Declaration of Independence, “The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
Brace Yourself -- Cutting edge historians are breaking new ground to help us understand the dogged persistence of white racism.
By Frank Joyce / AlterNet
Ah, July 4th. Of all the national orgies of self-congratulation, militarism and, of course, shopping, this one stands out. Even more than, say, Memorial Day, it perfectly captures the combination of myths and ignorance that make up the fairy-tale view we hold of our national origins and character.
Better understanding our history is especially important to our ongoing struggle to come to terms with white racism. The truth is its roots run much deeper than most whites even begin to understand or acknowledge.
Fortunately, a new generation of scholars is bringing new research and perspective to our understanding of what really happened and therefore why white racism is so intractable. (A partial list of essential recent books appears at the end of this article.)
What most of us think the Declaration of Independence says is this and only this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But there was much more to the Declaration than those famous words. Far more attention was dedicated to a long list of grievances that the founding fathers had with the King. One of them was that the British were in cahoots with, “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Another complaint which didn’t make it into the Declaration but was included in a precursor document, the Virginia Constitution, complained that the British were “prompting our Negroes to rise in arms against us…”
The first slaves arrived in what is now the United States in 1619. By the late 1700s, they were already a critical component of the economy and of the political conversation that led to the conflict with England.
So much so that historian Gerald Horne poses a radical reinterpretation of the founding of the nation’s origins, in his trailblazing book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776. “Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state,” he writes.
Citing previously ignored evidence, Horne argues convincingly that a combination of alarm over the growing abolition sentiment in Britain, well underway by the late 1700s, and the deep-rooted fear of potential British support for slave uprisings were major motivating forces behind the desire for “independence” in the first place.
Sally E. Hadden advances that argument as well in her book Slave Patrols—Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas:
"By the mid-1770s, incessant rumors calculated that the British would not merely incite the slaves to revolt, but would go so far as to arm them against their white masters. As early as 1774, the Virginian Arthur Lee read a pamphlet in London which suggested that the patriots might not go to war if their slaves were inspired to revolt against them. Likewise, James Madison thought a bill freeing slaves had been introduced in Parliament although no such bill has ever been located. This type of volatile gossip spread with lightning speed. In May 1775 the South-Carolina Gazette printed a letter from London in which the writer speculated that the English government had sent 78,000 guns to America to ‘put into the hands of N*****s.'"
And indeed, notwithstanding the legend of Crispus Attucks, a black man, as the first pro-independence casualty of the revolution, most African-Americans and indigenous people who fought at all fought on the side of the British. And why not? Nothing was to be gained for them in transferring power from the King of England to the white property owners of the colonies, many of whom were slave-owners or otherwise profiting from the slave trade.
Thomas Jefferson himself said as much in his account of the Declaration of Independence, “The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”
The Inconvenient Truth
The reality represented by July 4th is this: protecting slavery and antagonism toward Native Americans was inseparable from the lofty ideals promulgated by the founding fathers. Yes, the one percenters of 1776 sought “freedom” from a colonial master. But accurately understanding our history makes it clear that the “revolution” was not against colonialism per se. Rather it was to swap the masters at the top of the colonial pyramid from those who lived in England to those who lived in Virginia, Maryland, New York, South Carolina, Georgia and the rest of the 13 colonies.
For more proof, fast forward to the modern era. Is anti-colonialism at the core of our deepest values? When we celebrate July 4th, do we, for example, identify with other anti-colonial struggles such as that of the Vietnamese against the French following WWII? Of course not.
When Ho Chi Minh, who based the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence on our own, approached Harry Truman for assistance in throwing off the yoke of French colonialism, Truman famously turned a deaf ear. In fact, the United States became a major supporter of the French to the point of offering them nuclear weapons to use against the Vietnamese. This despite the fact that the U.S. was only too willing to fight side-by-side with Ho Chi Minh in WWII against the Japanese.
And as we all know, when the Vietnamese defeated the French and won their independence anyway, the U.S. took up the fight to overthrow Ho Chi Minh directly, bringing enormous death and devastation to Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. The U.S. record of support for anti-colonial struggles in Africa is no better.
With the possible exception of some interventions driven by geo-political considerations, the United States has never supported any anti-colonial struggle except our own. To be sure, along with solidifying the first apartheid state, the revolution also set the stage for the State protecting some core ideals such as trial-by-jury and freedom of movement, press and speech. That’s why this essay can be openly published.
That does not change however the fact that the fight for independence from England decidedly did not draw a principled line against colonialism. Rather, it was a fight for control of the settler colonialism that came to define the history of brutal westward expansion to California, Hawaii, the Philippines and beyond.
As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of another ground breaking book, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, points out in a recent article:
U.S. policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism.
The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.
Especially taken together, the work of Horne, Dunbar-Ortiz, Ned and Constance Sublette and others demolishes the storybook picture that has dominated the telling of U.S. American history for centuries. Perhaps most importantly their research reveals that U.S. capitalism and the unique U.S. slave system were invented simultaneously as one thing. This places debates over race versus class in a different perspective. Simply put, it’s a mostly useless conversation that does more to obscure what we are dealing with than to explain it. And yes, the left sadly has its own virulent strain of race deniers past and present.
Especially as cotton became the driver of the global economy, race-based capitalism drove the push for more territory for slavery in the South and West. That not only exponentially expanded the market for the domestic slave industry, it also contributed greatly to the need to slaughter and displace Native Americans. Mile by mile; law by law; massacre by massacre; whipping by whipping; lynching by lynching and war by war the system that drives the violent and existential danger to all life visited by white male power all over the earth was created and consolidated.
The reality represented by July 4th is this: protecting slavery and antagonism toward Native Americans was inseparable from the lofty ideals promulgated by the founding fathers. Yes, the one percenters of 1776 sought “freedom” from a colonial master. But accurately understanding our history makes it clear that the “revolution” was not against colonialism per se. Rather it was to swap the masters at the top of the colonial pyramid from those who lived in England to those who lived in Virginia, Maryland, New York, South Carolina, Georgia and the rest of the 13 colonies.
For more proof, fast forward to the modern era. Is anti-colonialism at the core of our deepest values? When we celebrate July 4th, do we, for example, identify with other anti-colonial struggles such as that of the Vietnamese against the French following WWII? Of course not.
When Ho Chi Minh, who based the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence on our own, approached Harry Truman for assistance in throwing off the yoke of French colonialism, Truman famously turned a deaf ear. In fact, the United States became a major supporter of the French to the point of offering them nuclear weapons to use against the Vietnamese. This despite the fact that the U.S. was only too willing to fight side-by-side with Ho Chi Minh in WWII against the Japanese.
And as we all know, when the Vietnamese defeated the French and won their independence anyway, the U.S. took up the fight to overthrow Ho Chi Minh directly, bringing enormous death and devastation to Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. The U.S. record of support for anti-colonial struggles in Africa is no better.
With the possible exception of some interventions driven by geo-political considerations, the United States has never supported any anti-colonial struggle except our own. To be sure, along with solidifying the first apartheid state, the revolution also set the stage for the State protecting some core ideals such as trial-by-jury and freedom of movement, press and speech. That’s why this essay can be openly published.
That does not change however the fact that the fight for independence from England decidedly did not draw a principled line against colonialism. Rather, it was a fight for control of the settler colonialism that came to define the history of brutal westward expansion to California, Hawaii, the Philippines and beyond.
As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of another ground breaking book, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, points out in a recent article:
U.S. policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism.
The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.
Especially taken together, the work of Horne, Dunbar-Ortiz, Ned and Constance Sublette and others demolishes the storybook picture that has dominated the telling of U.S. American history for centuries. Perhaps most importantly their research reveals that U.S. capitalism and the unique U.S. slave system were invented simultaneously as one thing. This places debates over race versus class in a different perspective. Simply put, it’s a mostly useless conversation that does more to obscure what we are dealing with than to explain it. And yes, the left sadly has its own virulent strain of race deniers past and present.
Especially as cotton became the driver of the global economy, race-based capitalism drove the push for more territory for slavery in the South and West. That not only exponentially expanded the market for the domestic slave industry, it also contributed greatly to the need to slaughter and displace Native Americans. Mile by mile; law by law; massacre by massacre; whipping by whipping; lynching by lynching and war by war the system that drives the violent and existential danger to all life visited by white male power all over the earth was created and consolidated.
By the Dawn’s Early Light
O’er all this waves the flag. Nothing gets more attention on July 4th than the flag. Ironically, all by itself, the stars and stripes can tell us more than we learn from textbooks. The stripes of course are the original 13 colonies. The stars represent brutal colonial expansion and plunder of which Hawaii, the 50th state is an especially poignant example.
As a relevant side note, the National Anthem has its own dirty little secret. Composed during the fight with the British known as The War of 1812, its third stanza is virtually never sung today. As Ned and Constance Sublette explain in The American Slave Coast—A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, there is a reason for that. The last part of that stanza is:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star Spangled Banner" lyrics, was himself a slave owner and hard core white supremacist. The reference to the hireling and the slave is to those, including former slaves, who were fighting on the side of the British. The Sublettes point out further, “New England did not want the war of 1812, the Southerners did. They got what they wanted: under cover of war with Britain a substantial chunk of the Deep South was made safe for plantation slavery when Andrew Jackson vanquished the Creek Nation and took its land.”
Do we have a better banner to wave? Not yet.
So, does this mean that there is nothing to celebrate in the founding of the United States? That is a good and difficult question. Frederick Douglass wrestled with it when asked to speak to a gathering in Rochester, New York on July 4th, 1852:
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too—great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.
The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?
That was 164 years ago. Who do we mock today if we wallow in July 4th business as usual? It was one thing for Frederick Douglass to begin his remarks by offering respect to the Founding Fathers in 1852. In 2016 race based capitalism menaces not just enslaved Black people and Native Americans, but animals (including humans), plants, oceans, lakes and air. Changes in form such as the hard-won expansion of the franchise notwithstanding, white male power rules the earth more dangerously today than it did in 1776.
So as we peer through the haze of fireworks, barbeque smoke and the red glare of drone fired rockets this July 4th, let us spend some time in contemplation. If indeed we are “free,” does our freedom permit us to move past the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism that Martin Luther King challenged us to confront?
The late Vincent Harding dedicated his life to the belief that we can. Vincent was fond of saying, “I am a citizen of a country that does not yet exist.” Amen to that.
O’er all this waves the flag. Nothing gets more attention on July 4th than the flag. Ironically, all by itself, the stars and stripes can tell us more than we learn from textbooks. The stripes of course are the original 13 colonies. The stars represent brutal colonial expansion and plunder of which Hawaii, the 50th state is an especially poignant example.
As a relevant side note, the National Anthem has its own dirty little secret. Composed during the fight with the British known as The War of 1812, its third stanza is virtually never sung today. As Ned and Constance Sublette explain in The American Slave Coast—A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, there is a reason for that. The last part of that stanza is:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Francis Scott Key, author of the "Star Spangled Banner" lyrics, was himself a slave owner and hard core white supremacist. The reference to the hireling and the slave is to those, including former slaves, who were fighting on the side of the British. The Sublettes point out further, “New England did not want the war of 1812, the Southerners did. They got what they wanted: under cover of war with Britain a substantial chunk of the Deep South was made safe for plantation slavery when Andrew Jackson vanquished the Creek Nation and took its land.”
Do we have a better banner to wave? Not yet.
So, does this mean that there is nothing to celebrate in the founding of the United States? That is a good and difficult question. Frederick Douglass wrestled with it when asked to speak to a gathering in Rochester, New York on July 4th, 1852:
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too—great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.
The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?
That was 164 years ago. Who do we mock today if we wallow in July 4th business as usual? It was one thing for Frederick Douglass to begin his remarks by offering respect to the Founding Fathers in 1852. In 2016 race based capitalism menaces not just enslaved Black people and Native Americans, but animals (including humans), plants, oceans, lakes and air. Changes in form such as the hard-won expansion of the franchise notwithstanding, white male power rules the earth more dangerously today than it did in 1776.
So as we peer through the haze of fireworks, barbeque smoke and the red glare of drone fired rockets this July 4th, let us spend some time in contemplation. If indeed we are “free,” does our freedom permit us to move past the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism that Martin Luther King challenged us to confront?
The late Vincent Harding dedicated his life to the belief that we can. Vincent was fond of saying, “I am a citizen of a country that does not yet exist.” Amen to that.
An incomplete but basic list of essential new work on U.S. history includes:
Frank Joyce is a lifelong Detroit labor and political activist and writer.
On the Roots of American Racism:
An Interview with Noam Chomsky
By George Yancy, The Hampton Institute,
George Yancy: When I think about the title of your book "On Western Terrorism," I'm reminded of the fact that many black people in the United States have had a long history of being terrorized by white racism, from random beatings to the lynching of more than 3,000 black people (including women) between 1882 and 1968. This is why in 2003, when I read about the dehumanizing acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison, I wasn't surprised. I recall that after the photos appeared President George W. Bush said that "This is not the America I know." But isn't this the America black people have always known?
Noam Chomsky: The America that "black people have always known" is not an attractive one. The first black slaves were brought to the colonies 400 years ago. We cannot allow ourselves to forget that during this long period there have been only a few decades when African-Americans, apart from a few, had some limited possibilities for entering the mainstream of American society.
We also cannot allow ourselves to forget that the hideous slave labor camps of the new "empire of liberty" were a primary source for the wealth and privilege of American society, as well as England and the continent. The industrial revolution was based on cotton, produced primarily in the slave labor camps of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson feared the liberation of slaves, who had "ten thousand recollections" of the crimes to which they were subjected.
As is now known, they were highly efficient. Productivity increased even faster than in industry, thanks to the technology of the bullwhip and pistol, and the efficient practice of brutal torture, as Edward E. Baptist demonstrates in his recent study, " The Half Has Never Been Told." The achievement includes not only the great wealth of the planter aristocracy but also American and British manufacturing, commerce and the financial institutions of modern state capitalism.
It is, or should be, well-known that the United States developed by flatly rejecting the principles of "sound economics" preached to it by the leading economists of the day, and familiar in today's sober instructions to latecomers in development. Instead, the newly liberated colonies followed the model of England with radical state intervention in the economy, including high tariffs to protect infant industry, first textiles, later steel and others.
There was also another "virtual tariff." In 1807, President Jefferson signed a bill banning the importation of slaves from abroad. His state of Virginia was the richest and most powerful of the states, and had exhausted its need for slaves. Rather, it was beginning to produce this valuable commodity for the expanding slave territories of the South. Banning import of these cotton-picking machines was thus a considerable boost to the Virginia economy. That was understood. Speaking for the slave importers, Charles Pinckney charged that "Virginia will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value, and she has more than she wants." And Virginia indeed became a major exporter of slaves to the expanding slave society.
Some of the slave-owners, like Jefferson, appreciated the moral turpitude on which the economy relied. But he feared the liberation of slaves, who have "ten thousand recollections" of the crimes to which they were subjected. Fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture, with reverberations to the present.
The Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery, but a decade later "slavery by another name" (also the title of an important study by Douglas A. Blackmon) was introduced. Black life was criminalized by overly harsh codes that targeted black people. Soon an even more valuable form of slavery was available for agribusiness, mining, steel - more valuable because the state, not the capitalist, was responsible for sustaining the enslaved labor force, meaning that blacks were arrested without real cause and prisoners were put to work for these business interests. The system provided a major contribution to the rapid industrial development from the late 19 th century.
That system remained pretty much in place until World War II led to a need for free labor for the war industry. Then followed a few decades of rapid and relatively egalitarian growth, with the state playing an even more critical role in economic development than before. A black man might get a decent job in a unionized factory, buy a house, send his children to college, along with other opportunities. The civil rights movement opened other doors, though in limited ways. One illustration was the fate of Martin Luther King's efforts to confront northern racism and develop a movement of the poor, which was effectively blocked.
The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late '70s, escalating under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few hands. Reagan's drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution, initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's apt term for the revived criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration rates and the devastating impact on black society.
Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of their complex and rich civilizations.
'Intentional ignorance' regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans.
G.Y. : While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon which slavery was based, in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over their own . These myths, along with the black codes following the civil war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to continue to oppress and police black people today?
N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too recently. On "contemporary myths and codes," I would rather defer to the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.
Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. The title of Baptist's book is all too apt, and the aftermath is much too little known and understood.
There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called "intentional ignorance" of what it is inconvenient to know: "Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry." The appalling statistics of today's circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require - that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.
Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was "the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other." And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever." Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams's reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment."
What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.
G.Y.: This "intentional ignorance" regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans. It was 18th century Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus who argued that Native Americans were governed by traits such as being "prone to anger," a convenient myth for justifying the need for Native Americans to be "civilized" by whites. So, there are myths here as well. How does North America's "amnesia" contribute to forms of racism directed uniquely toward Native Americans in our present moment and to their continual genocide?
N.C. : The useful myths began early on, and continue to the present. One of the first myths was formally established right after the King of England granted a Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, declaring that conversion of the Indians to Christianity is "the principal end of this plantation." The colonists at once created the Great Seal of the Colony, which depicts an Indian holding a spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, with a scroll coming from his mouth pleading with the colonists to "Come over and help us." This may have been the first case of "humanitarian intervention" - and, curiously, it turned out like so many others.
Years later Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story mused about "the wisdom of Providence" that caused the natives to disappear like "the withered leaves of autumn" even though the colonists had "constantly respected" them. Needless to say, the colonists who did not choose "intentional ignorance" knew much better, and the most knowledgeable, like Gen. Henry Knox, the first secretary of war of the United States, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union [by means] more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."
Knox went on to warn that "a future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors." There were a few - very few - who did so, like the heroic Helen Jackson, who in 1880 provided a detailed account of that "sad revelation of broken faith, of violated treaties, and of inhuman acts of violence [that] will bring a flush of shame to the cheeks of those who love their country." Jackson's important book barely sold. She was neglected and dismissed in favor of the version presented by Theodore Roosevelt, who explained that "The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries…has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place," notably those who had been "extirpated" or expelled to destitution and misery.
The national poet, Walt Whitman, captured the general understanding when he wrote that "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." It wasn't until the 1960s that the scale of the atrocities and their character began to enter even scholarship, and to some extent popular consciousness, though there is a long way to go.
That's only a bare beginning of the shocking record of the Anglosphere and its settler-colonial version of imperialism, a form of imperialism that leads quite naturally to the "utter extirpation" of the indigenous population - and to "intentional ignorance" on the part of beneficiaries of the crimes.
G.Y.: Your response raises the issue of colonization as a form of occupation. James Baldwin, in his 1966 essay, "A Report from Occupied Territory," wrote, "Harlem is policed like occupied territory." This quote made me think of Ferguson, Mo. Some of the protesters in Ferguson even compared what they were seeing to the Gaza Strip. Can you speak to this comparative discourse of occupation?
N.C. : All kinds of comparisons are possible. When I went to the Gaza Strip a few years ago, what came to mind very quickly was the experience of being in jail (for civil disobedience, many times): the feeling, very strange to people who have had privileged lives, that you are totally under the control of some external authority, arbitrary and if it so chooses, cruel. But the differences between the two cases are, of course, vast.
More generally, I'm somewhat skeptical about the value of comparisons of the kind mentioned. There will of course be features common to the many diverse kinds of illegitimate authority, repression and violence. Sometimes they can be illuminating; for example, Michelle Alexander's analogy of a new Jim Crow, mentioned earlier. Often they may efface crucial distinctions. I don't frankly see anything general to say of much value. Each comparison has to be evaluated on its own.
G.Y.: These differences are vast and I certainly don't want to conflate them. Post-911 seems to have ushered in an important space for making some comparisons. Some seem to think that Muslims of Arab descent have replaced African-Americans as the pariah in the United States. What are your views on this?
N.C.: Anti-Arab/Muslim racism has a long history, and there's been a fair amount of literature about it. Jack Shaheen's studies of stereotyping in visual media, for example. And there's no doubt that it's increased in recent years. To give just one vivid current example, audiences flocked in record-breaking numbers to a film, described in The New York Times Arts section as "a patriotic, pro-family picture," about a sniper who claims to hold the championship in killing Iraqis during the United States invasion, and proudly describes his targets as "savage, despicable, evil … really no other way to describe what we encountered there." This was referring specifically to his first kill, a woman holding a grenade when under attack by United States forces.
What's important is not just the mentality of the sniper, but the reaction to such exploits at home when we invade and destroy a foreign country, hardly distinguishing one "raghead" from another. These attitudes go back to the "merciless Indian savages" of the Declaration of Independence and the savagery and fiendishness of others who have been in the way ever since, particularly when some "racial" element can be invoked - as when Lyndon Johnson lamented that if we let down our guard, we'll be at the mercy of "every yellow dwarf with a pocket knife." But within the United States, though there have been deplorable incidents, anti-Arab/Muslim racism among the public has been fairly restrained, I think.
G.Y.: Lastly, the reality of racism (whether it's anti-black, anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, etc.) is toxic. While there is no single solution to racism, especially in terms of its various manifestations, what do you see as some of the necessary requirements for ending racist hatred?
N.C.: It's easy to rattle off the usual answers: education, exploring and addressing the sources of the malady, joining together in common enterprises - labor struggles have been an important case - and so on. The answers are right, and have achieved a lot. Racism is far from eradicated, but it is not what it was not very long ago, thanks to such efforts. It's a long, hard road. No magic wand, as far as I know.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Joy James, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Shannon Sullivan and Naomi Zack) can be found here .
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including "Black Bodies, White Gazes," "Look, a White!" and "Pursuing Trayvon Martin," co-edited with Janine Jones.
An Interview with Noam Chomsky
By George Yancy, The Hampton Institute,
George Yancy: When I think about the title of your book "On Western Terrorism," I'm reminded of the fact that many black people in the United States have had a long history of being terrorized by white racism, from random beatings to the lynching of more than 3,000 black people (including women) between 1882 and 1968. This is why in 2003, when I read about the dehumanizing acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison, I wasn't surprised. I recall that after the photos appeared President George W. Bush said that "This is not the America I know." But isn't this the America black people have always known?
Noam Chomsky: The America that "black people have always known" is not an attractive one. The first black slaves were brought to the colonies 400 years ago. We cannot allow ourselves to forget that during this long period there have been only a few decades when African-Americans, apart from a few, had some limited possibilities for entering the mainstream of American society.
We also cannot allow ourselves to forget that the hideous slave labor camps of the new "empire of liberty" were a primary source for the wealth and privilege of American society, as well as England and the continent. The industrial revolution was based on cotton, produced primarily in the slave labor camps of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson feared the liberation of slaves, who had "ten thousand recollections" of the crimes to which they were subjected.
As is now known, they were highly efficient. Productivity increased even faster than in industry, thanks to the technology of the bullwhip and pistol, and the efficient practice of brutal torture, as Edward E. Baptist demonstrates in his recent study, " The Half Has Never Been Told." The achievement includes not only the great wealth of the planter aristocracy but also American and British manufacturing, commerce and the financial institutions of modern state capitalism.
It is, or should be, well-known that the United States developed by flatly rejecting the principles of "sound economics" preached to it by the leading economists of the day, and familiar in today's sober instructions to latecomers in development. Instead, the newly liberated colonies followed the model of England with radical state intervention in the economy, including high tariffs to protect infant industry, first textiles, later steel and others.
There was also another "virtual tariff." In 1807, President Jefferson signed a bill banning the importation of slaves from abroad. His state of Virginia was the richest and most powerful of the states, and had exhausted its need for slaves. Rather, it was beginning to produce this valuable commodity for the expanding slave territories of the South. Banning import of these cotton-picking machines was thus a considerable boost to the Virginia economy. That was understood. Speaking for the slave importers, Charles Pinckney charged that "Virginia will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value, and she has more than she wants." And Virginia indeed became a major exporter of slaves to the expanding slave society.
Some of the slave-owners, like Jefferson, appreciated the moral turpitude on which the economy relied. But he feared the liberation of slaves, who have "ten thousand recollections" of the crimes to which they were subjected. Fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture, with reverberations to the present.
The Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery, but a decade later "slavery by another name" (also the title of an important study by Douglas A. Blackmon) was introduced. Black life was criminalized by overly harsh codes that targeted black people. Soon an even more valuable form of slavery was available for agribusiness, mining, steel - more valuable because the state, not the capitalist, was responsible for sustaining the enslaved labor force, meaning that blacks were arrested without real cause and prisoners were put to work for these business interests. The system provided a major contribution to the rapid industrial development from the late 19 th century.
That system remained pretty much in place until World War II led to a need for free labor for the war industry. Then followed a few decades of rapid and relatively egalitarian growth, with the state playing an even more critical role in economic development than before. A black man might get a decent job in a unionized factory, buy a house, send his children to college, along with other opportunities. The civil rights movement opened other doors, though in limited ways. One illustration was the fate of Martin Luther King's efforts to confront northern racism and develop a movement of the poor, which was effectively blocked.
The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late '70s, escalating under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few hands. Reagan's drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution, initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's apt term for the revived criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration rates and the devastating impact on black society.
Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of their complex and rich civilizations.
'Intentional ignorance' regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans.
G.Y. : While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon which slavery was based, in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over their own . These myths, along with the black codes following the civil war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to continue to oppress and police black people today?
N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too recently. On "contemporary myths and codes," I would rather defer to the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.
Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. The title of Baptist's book is all too apt, and the aftermath is much too little known and understood.
There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called "intentional ignorance" of what it is inconvenient to know: "Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry." The appalling statistics of today's circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require - that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.
Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was "the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other." And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever." Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams's reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment."
What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.
G.Y.: This "intentional ignorance" regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans. It was 18th century Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus who argued that Native Americans were governed by traits such as being "prone to anger," a convenient myth for justifying the need for Native Americans to be "civilized" by whites. So, there are myths here as well. How does North America's "amnesia" contribute to forms of racism directed uniquely toward Native Americans in our present moment and to their continual genocide?
N.C. : The useful myths began early on, and continue to the present. One of the first myths was formally established right after the King of England granted a Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, declaring that conversion of the Indians to Christianity is "the principal end of this plantation." The colonists at once created the Great Seal of the Colony, which depicts an Indian holding a spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, with a scroll coming from his mouth pleading with the colonists to "Come over and help us." This may have been the first case of "humanitarian intervention" - and, curiously, it turned out like so many others.
Years later Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story mused about "the wisdom of Providence" that caused the natives to disappear like "the withered leaves of autumn" even though the colonists had "constantly respected" them. Needless to say, the colonists who did not choose "intentional ignorance" knew much better, and the most knowledgeable, like Gen. Henry Knox, the first secretary of war of the United States, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union [by means] more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."
Knox went on to warn that "a future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors." There were a few - very few - who did so, like the heroic Helen Jackson, who in 1880 provided a detailed account of that "sad revelation of broken faith, of violated treaties, and of inhuman acts of violence [that] will bring a flush of shame to the cheeks of those who love their country." Jackson's important book barely sold. She was neglected and dismissed in favor of the version presented by Theodore Roosevelt, who explained that "The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries…has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place," notably those who had been "extirpated" or expelled to destitution and misery.
The national poet, Walt Whitman, captured the general understanding when he wrote that "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." It wasn't until the 1960s that the scale of the atrocities and their character began to enter even scholarship, and to some extent popular consciousness, though there is a long way to go.
That's only a bare beginning of the shocking record of the Anglosphere and its settler-colonial version of imperialism, a form of imperialism that leads quite naturally to the "utter extirpation" of the indigenous population - and to "intentional ignorance" on the part of beneficiaries of the crimes.
G.Y.: Your response raises the issue of colonization as a form of occupation. James Baldwin, in his 1966 essay, "A Report from Occupied Territory," wrote, "Harlem is policed like occupied territory." This quote made me think of Ferguson, Mo. Some of the protesters in Ferguson even compared what they were seeing to the Gaza Strip. Can you speak to this comparative discourse of occupation?
N.C. : All kinds of comparisons are possible. When I went to the Gaza Strip a few years ago, what came to mind very quickly was the experience of being in jail (for civil disobedience, many times): the feeling, very strange to people who have had privileged lives, that you are totally under the control of some external authority, arbitrary and if it so chooses, cruel. But the differences between the two cases are, of course, vast.
More generally, I'm somewhat skeptical about the value of comparisons of the kind mentioned. There will of course be features common to the many diverse kinds of illegitimate authority, repression and violence. Sometimes they can be illuminating; for example, Michelle Alexander's analogy of a new Jim Crow, mentioned earlier. Often they may efface crucial distinctions. I don't frankly see anything general to say of much value. Each comparison has to be evaluated on its own.
G.Y.: These differences are vast and I certainly don't want to conflate them. Post-911 seems to have ushered in an important space for making some comparisons. Some seem to think that Muslims of Arab descent have replaced African-Americans as the pariah in the United States. What are your views on this?
N.C.: Anti-Arab/Muslim racism has a long history, and there's been a fair amount of literature about it. Jack Shaheen's studies of stereotyping in visual media, for example. And there's no doubt that it's increased in recent years. To give just one vivid current example, audiences flocked in record-breaking numbers to a film, described in The New York Times Arts section as "a patriotic, pro-family picture," about a sniper who claims to hold the championship in killing Iraqis during the United States invasion, and proudly describes his targets as "savage, despicable, evil … really no other way to describe what we encountered there." This was referring specifically to his first kill, a woman holding a grenade when under attack by United States forces.
What's important is not just the mentality of the sniper, but the reaction to such exploits at home when we invade and destroy a foreign country, hardly distinguishing one "raghead" from another. These attitudes go back to the "merciless Indian savages" of the Declaration of Independence and the savagery and fiendishness of others who have been in the way ever since, particularly when some "racial" element can be invoked - as when Lyndon Johnson lamented that if we let down our guard, we'll be at the mercy of "every yellow dwarf with a pocket knife." But within the United States, though there have been deplorable incidents, anti-Arab/Muslim racism among the public has been fairly restrained, I think.
G.Y.: Lastly, the reality of racism (whether it's anti-black, anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, etc.) is toxic. While there is no single solution to racism, especially in terms of its various manifestations, what do you see as some of the necessary requirements for ending racist hatred?
N.C.: It's easy to rattle off the usual answers: education, exploring and addressing the sources of the malady, joining together in common enterprises - labor struggles have been an important case - and so on. The answers are right, and have achieved a lot. Racism is far from eradicated, but it is not what it was not very long ago, thanks to such efforts. It's a long, hard road. No magic wand, as far as I know.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Joy James, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Shannon Sullivan and Naomi Zack) can be found here .
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including "Black Bodies, White Gazes," "Look, a White!" and "Pursuing Trayvon Martin," co-edited with Janine Jones.
