The Pogrom, Indians, and Genealogies of the Israeli Settler-Vigilante

By Gary Fields

Republished from Monthly Review.

On February 26th of this year, the world witnessed an outbreak of untold savagery in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated against town residents by vigilantes from nearby Israeli settlements. During this mayhem, settlers set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents, and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in committing these crimes. So depraved was this settler rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs described it as a “pogrom.”

The choice of the term, “pogrom” to label the carnage committed by these Jewish settlers was poignant. History is replete with examples of such mayhem committed against Jews by anti-Semitic European Christians, but the irony of Jews animated by similar kinds of racist animus toward the Palestinian “other,” and enlisting the same types of brutality against innocent Palestinian civilians, was particularly jarring. Sadly, it is no secret that Israeli settler violence against Palestinians has become routine in the Palestinian West Bank, especially in rural areas where groups of settlers target Palestinian farmers, often at gunpoint, while uprooting and setting fire to Palestinian croplands, especially olive trees (Fields, 2012).

At the time of events in Huwara, Israeli settler violence, was already on the rise, emboldened if not encouraged outright by the most settler-friendly, and arguably fascist government in Israel’s history. Trending at three attacks per day in February, settler violence is now averaging 7-9 daily attacks as documented by the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality.

Currently, as this settler regime continues its vengeful bombardment of Gaza, settlers in the West Bank have become even more brazen in their brutality—with Huwara as a model. Palestinian houses and cars are now being routinely targeted, vandalized, and set ablaze, Palestinian croplands ripped up and burned, and bodily attacks against Palestinians, above all olive harvesters, appear daily on the inventory of settler misdeeds.

In just one of countless incidents since October 7th, settlers in the West Bank town of Qusra near Nablus, shot and killed three Palestinians, and the following day attacked the funeral murdering another two men, ramming their cars into the funeral procession before stopping and opening fire on the procession. It is now the olive harvest in Palestine and in town after town, olive harvesters seeking to pick the crop confront setters with guns who threaten these Palestinians and order them off their own lands. Arguably the most revealing of this vigilantism in terms of motivation, however, occurred in the small Bedouin village of Wadi Seeq 10 kilometers East of Ramallah where settlers succeeded in terrorizing the residents so completely that the latter abandoned the village, fearing for their safety and leaving behind houses, livestock, and crops. Settlers have now taken possession of the village in what is surely a signal of the end game in this sinister activity.

It is tempting to view this settler violence as something so macabre and sinister as to be unique. There is, however, quite another way of understanding the Israeli settler-vigilante. This actor is actually the modern-day mirror image of a certain settler counterpart from the American colonial past. This genealogy not only imbues the Israeli settler with an identity as an historical actor. It enables a different kind of question to be posed about Israel settler violence: In what way is the vigilantism of the Israeli settler embedded in past colonial settler societies, and who is the Israeli setter-vigilante as an historical actor?

The Israeli Settler as Colonial Actor

In most major media accounts of settler terror against Palestinians, Israeli settler-vigilantes invariably escape critical categorization beyond the moniker of “extremist.” Portrayals of these perpetrators of violence invariably focus on the theme of fanaticism while presenting these figures as unsavory if misguided fringe elements in Israeli society. Such characterizations are naïve and incomplete.

The Israeli settler is the modern-day counterpart of a recurrent figure in settler societies worldwide but one specific example from American colonial history stands out in connecting the colonial past to present day.

In the early 19th century, in the American Southeast, most notably in Georgia, groups of settlers, believing themselves to be the deserving inheritors of American bounty and the rightful stewards of land in America, took it upon themselves to rid the landscape of those who would stand in their way. Their mission was to evict from the land those already anchored to the landscape whom these settlers believed to be impediments to their imagined vision of themselves and their rightfully dominant place on the landscape as ordained by God. Their target was none other than the Indigenous inhabitants of the American Southeast.

Motivated by theories of entitlement to land in the tradition of John Locke, and sentiments of superiority deriving from destiny and God’s will, these 19th century brethren of today’s Israeli setters squatted on Indian lands, burned Indian homes and croplands, stole Indian livestock and horses, and harassed and even killed Indians who failed to vacate their properties. These settlers, however, did not spring to life from any spontaneous impulses of self-organization.

For years, federal and state government officials along with voices from the white intelligentsia had been advocating publicly for the removal of Indians from the land contributing to a formidable “removal discourse” in American political, legal, and cultural life. These voices not only tolerated, but applauded acts of vigilantism against Indian groups as a useful instrument for helping accomplish what they were ultimately seeking through politics and the law—the removal of Indians from the landscape. Settler violence was a complement to this political, legal, and cultural climate. There was, in effect, a groundswell of support for Indian removal from the land, and the transfer of this group across the Mississippi to lands in the West. Settler violence was destined to play an integral role. What were the drivers of this project of removal and its complement of settler vigilantism in evicting Indians from their land?

Land Grab, Slavery, and Indian Removal

In the wake of the victorious Revolution against England, American colonial settlers were poised to be free of restrictions on acquisition of Indian lands that the English Crown had imposed on them. Nevertheless, administrations from George Washington through John Quincy Adams retained similar prohibitions on private acquisition of Indian land. Settlers who had expected freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from the Revolution were furious at what they perceived as this betrayal.

Those in Georgia pressured the State into a “Compact” (1802) with the Federal Government in which the latter agreed to extinguish Indian title to lands in the State and reallocate the Indian lands to settlers. In the years that followed, settlers and state officials in Georgia, including the Georgia Congressional delegation as well as politicians from other federal and state jurisdictions, clamored for the Federal Government to act more decisively in extinguishing Indian title to land and evicting Indians from the landscape. Settlers, believed that they could hasten this process of displacement, and reap the bounties they believed themselves entitled to, by direct action on the land. What made conflict on the land seemingly more inevitable, however, and what elevated the role of settler violence against Indians in this conflict was an economy poised to transform not only the American South but the world economy as well.

In the early decades of the 1800s, following refinements in the cotton gin and newly developed hybrid strains of cotton, settlers, especially in Georgia, saw untold opportunities for cotton-growing with slave labor on plantations. Plantation agriculture, however, required land but much of the land in Georgia coveted by these would-be cotton growers was held by Creeks and Cherokees. Although the federal government was indeed securing land in Georgia from these tribes and reallocating it to settlers in the spirit of the Georgia Compact, settlers and politicians alike from the State demanded that the Government hasten the pace of these acquisitions and evict Indians from their lands. Finally, in 1828, settlers found a sympathetic voice in a fiery populist whose presidential campaign focused on a single issue—Indian removal. The candidate was Andrew Jackson.

A decorated army General who made a name for himself from campaigns against Indians, Jackson the populist also championed “states’ rights” when it came to Indian affairs. Following his election, Jackson in 1829 emphasized that if states themselves voted to extend their own laws over Indians, he would not enlist the power of the federal government to prevent it (Cave, 2003: 1332). Jackson was thus prepared to use both states’ rights and the federal government to remove Indians from their lands and transfer them to lands West of the Mississippi River.

Equally critical, Jackson was also amenable to direct action by settlers as a complement to an already well-established climate of fear associated with the campaign to remove Indians from their land and did not conceal his support for such efforts. In 1829, he famously signaled his advocacy of settler violence as a component of Indian removal when he suggested to a Congressman from Georgia who was irate at delays in extinguishing Indian title to land from the Georgia Compact: “Build a fire under them [Indians]. When it gets hot enough, they’ll move” (from Cave, 2003: 1339). Settlers who would build these fires had little reason to fear retribution from either federal or state authorities for their criminal actions.

In 1830, Jackson signed the legislation that defined his presidency and became the law of the land, the Indian Removal Act. Even before the Act became law, however, Cherokee and Creek Indians in Georgia, aware of the incendiary removal discourse within the halls of government and among the colonial population, alongside the violence being committed by settlers on Indian lands, began “voluntarily” removing themselves to lands in the West. In this sense, setter violence and intimidation was successful as a complement to the Law. One Cherokee chief, wrote to Andrew Jackson to complain that white settlers had invaded Indian country to “steal our property” and that federal soldiers in the area not only refused to help the Indians, but aided the vigilantes in hunting down and shooting Indians who resisted “as if…they had been so many wild dogs” (Cave, 2003: 1340).

The parallels with the actions of Israeli settlers are unmistakable. A highly charged legal and political climate, complemented by settler rampages on Indian lands in which authorities did nothing to stop these activities had rendered life impossible for Indians. The latter believed that they had little choice but to transfer themselves West and escape the violence.

Final Solution: Vigilantism and Transferring Populations

If settler violence prior to passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was critical in creating splits among Creeks and Cherokees and compelling large numbers of these tribes to move West voluntarily, a vast array of vigilante groups, emboldened by passage of the Removal Law, emerged after 1830 to finish the task of evicting Indians from their lands. From horse thieves known as “The Pony Club,” to various paramilitary formations engaged in burning homes and crops and terrorizing Indians populations, settler vigilantism became even more widespread in the aftermath of the Removal Act as a weapon against tribespeople who tried to resist the Law and remain in their lands.

By 1838, even Cherokee who had resisted the Indian Removal Act and remained steadfast in their homes, conceded that the incessant settler rampages against them, along with inaction by the authorities, left them no choice but to accept removal and move West. What ensued under the auspices of the Federal Government was one of the sorriest criminal events in American history, the death march of 60,000 Indians from the Southeast to Oklahoma known as “Trail of Tears.”

In effect, settler violence had become an unofficial but acceptable expedient for carrying out a policy of forcing Indians from their land and insuring the promise of economic opportunity for Georgia’s white citizen-settlers (Pratt, 2022). In many ways, settler vigilantes in the West Bank are staking out a similar role for themselves in the model of Huwara and Wadi Seeq. These vigilantes are involved in an unmistakable effort to make life for Palestinians so unbearable that the latter imitate their Indian brethren from the American Southeast and leave their lands.

In the end, settler violence in the service of Indian Removal in Georgia reveals an unsettling resonance with the Israeli settler-vigilante of today. The pogrom in Huwara and the countless incidents of Israeli settler vigilantism, both urban and rural, are essentially historical mirror images of the White man’s vision in the American Southeast, differing in time and place but aligned in their mutual determination to drive the Indigenous from their lands. This symmetry emphasizes once again that Palestine is not alone in its encounter with settler colonialism and its impulses of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. From the West Bank and Gaza, these impulses to subdue and subjugate Indigenous people through the most hideous kinds of carnage are on full display for the world. It is incumbent upon the world to wake up to this lesson of history and stop the madness that is now fully transparent for all to see.

References

Cave, Alfred A. (2003). “Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830.” The Historian. Vol. 65 (6): 1333-1353.

Fields, Gary (2012). “This is Our Land’: Collective Violence, Property Law, and Imagining the Geography of Palestine.” Journal of Cultural Geography. Vol 29 (3): 267-91.

Pratt, Adam J. (2022). Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence, and the White Man’s Chance. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

Anti-Asian Racism Never Stopped Being an Outgrowth of U.S. Imperialism

By Danny Haiphong

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

“Gimme that ball, gook.” 

“Can you see with those eyes, chink?” 

“Did your Dad get your Mom in Vietnam?” 

These were just some of the references to anti-Asian racism heard frequently throughout my childhood which were often accompanied by social humiliation and threats of violence, whether in the form of robbery (many times) or a puzzling curiosity about the size of my genitals. More politically correct adults would throw praise at my perceived “model minority” status. This sent an early message that the best means of surviving within a racist society was to focus on individual uplift and avoid conflict with those in power.

The U.S. mainstream has caught up with the existence of racism toward Asians in America, mainly because it has become harder to ignore. Violence directed at Asian Americans has skyrocketed since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Asian American Bar Association of New York, more than 2,500 cases of anti-Asian “hate incidents”  have been reported across the country between the months of March and September of 2020. Notable cases include the January assault of an elder Thai man  in San Francisco and the stabbing of a Chinese man  in New York’s Chinatown last month.

The wave of violence has caught the attention of the Biden administration, the corporate media, and prominent celebrities. Former NBA and current G-League player Jeremy Lin took a strong stance against anti-Asian racism in late February. Lin’s post on Facebook came in response to being called “coronavirus”  on the basketball court. His statement ended with a question: “Is anyone listening?” While more has been said in recent weeks about the rise of anti-Asian racism and the urgency to address it, scant attention has been placed on the context of anti-Asian racism and its roots in the history of U.S. imperialism. 

The United States was a willing participant in China’s “Century of Humiliation” following the Opium Wars of the early to mid-19th century. Prominent capitalists such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather Warren Delano  enriched themselves from the sale of opium, an industry imposed on China by way of treaties that massively displaced and impoverished the population. American gunboats sailed along the Yangtze protecting U.S. interests for nearly a century  prior to the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Migrant Chinese workers in the United States were dehumanized as “coolies” to justify the white supremacist violence leveled against them, even by a large section of organized labor .

The dehumanization of peoples of Asian descent is often isolated and disconnected from the white supremacist violence experienced by Black and indigenous peoples in the United States. Yet the U.S.’s original sins of racialized slavery and settler colonialism helped form the material basis for the rise of anti-Asian racism. During the decade and a half-long U.S. occupation of the Philippines, U.S. soldiers justified mass slaughter and plunder by routinely equating the Filipino people with the same racist tropes  used to describe Black Americans and Indigenous nations. Eventually, a unique language of racism  was deployed to normalize not only the destruction of the Philippines but also the internment of Japanese residents and the brutal wars of aggression waged in Korea , Vietnam , Laos , and Cambodia . As Black Americans faced the violence and exploitation of Jim Crow, the scope of white supremacy was widening in service of the U.S. project of imperialist domination.

However, U.S. imperialism has also required white supremacy to constantly shape shift to fit the interests of its ruling class. State violence and economic dislocation has unevenly affected the various nationalities that make up the “Asian American” umbrella. A concerted effort to “diversify” the U.S. mainstream with popular movies and programs highlighting of “Asian” riches has intensified the identification of Asian America as a privileged stratum far closer to white America on the class ladder than the U.S.’s oppressed and super exploited Black and Indigenous populations. The U.S. corporate media and political establishment has reinforced this generalization by paying close attention to forces in Asian American communities calling for more law enforcement protection against racist violence. 

All of this combined has divorced anti-Asian racism from its roots in the development of U.S. imperialism. The separation of anti-Asian racism from U.S. imperialism has both encouraged a potential reliance on the state to resolve the very racist violence it commits with regularity and the systematic erasure of the real reasons behind the rise in anti-Asian racism in the United States. Just as the United States deployed racism to justify its empire-building in the Asia Pacific during the 20th century, so too has the U.S. ruling class intensified a deep skepticism of China amid the devastating spread of COVID-19 on the U.S. mainland. While the corporate media has acknowledged the role of Trump’s scapegoating of China for the spread of COVID-19, it hasn’t explained why the U.S. is so hostile toward China in the first place.

The truth is that “Kung Flu” and other racist tropes peddled by Trump and his legions are only one aspect of a larger U.S. campaign to contain the rise of China. China is set to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy within a decade  and has garnered favorable international attention for its containment of COVID-19 and its efforts to curb extreme poverty  and climate breakdown . The rise of China has placed the hegemony of U.S. imperialism into question on the highest stage possible: that of the fundamental relations between nations and economies. This has spurred a U.S.-led New Cold War against China led by all sections of Washington’s establishment, including its most left-leaning elements.

The New Cold War on China is first and foremost a military campaign  comprised of four hundred U.S. military bases, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, and over sixty percent of all U.S. naval assets stationed in the Asia Pacific. But the U.S. strategy to contain China includes political and economic sabotage. Sanctions have been placed on Chinese officials and tech corporations and the U.S. has waged an endless campaign of interference in China’s internal affairs relating to Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and the city of Hong Kong. Both corporate and so-called progressive media such as Democracy Now  have obsessively focused on the reproduction of negative stories that mirror the U.S. Department of State’s official posture toward China. The endless stream of anti-China propaganda has been effective; eighty percent of all Americans currently view China unfavorably, according to recent polls. 

The only difference between the recent wave of intense anti-Asian racism and that which has endured over the course of U.S. history is the stage of the imperialist system. The U.S is no longer a rising empire. Rather, U.S. imperialism has entered a state of decay decades in the making and can only speak the language of military, political, and economic violence. The struggle against anti-Asian racism thus cannot be left to the militarized police forces terrorizing Black American communities or to the larger U.S. political apparatus that honed anti-Asian racism as a weapon of imperialist expansionism. Instead, U.S. hostility toward China and the peoples of the East should be seen as an opportunity to develop the broadest popular front possible toward the cause of peace, self-determination, and liberation from the oppressive rule of imperialism.

Danny Haiphong is a contributing editor to Black Agenda Report and co-author of the book “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.” Follow his work on Twitter @SpiritofHo and on YouTube as co-host with Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report Present's: The Left Lens. You can support Danny at www.patreon.com/dannyhaiphong

The Attention Industry: From Marketing and Advertising to Mass Media

By Marcus Kahn

When CocaCola flashes a vibrant video clip of a family clinking bottles, what are they doing? How about a car commercial with a movie star that talks more about the feeling of driving the car than its reliability? Or the targeted advertisements on the sidebar on your Facebook page? Are these corporations trying to inform you by presenting logically structured information? The obvious answer is “Of course not. They’re selling you something.” The more sinister, but equally accurate wording argues that the advertiser is trying to manipulate your decision-making paradigm by strategically feeding you sensory data.

The attention industry is tolerated by most Americans, largely because we don’t have a choice. We were all raised on commercials, and it’s gotten to the point where we forget we have a right to cognitive autonomy. If you talk to your parents, they are sure to have a trove of old jingles from companies that no longer exist, and a few especially catchy ones from companies that still do. The mental process that associates a jingle with a feeling is the same one that keeps the Pledge of Allegiance in your head after all these years, and fills your belly with warmth when you hear the Star Spangled Banner. Advertising seems different than propaganda because it’s coming from so many sources, rather than one clear institutional distributor, but the mechanisms are the same. Strategically expose a viewer or reader to certain information in order to guide the formation of their beliefs and actions. And the implications of this practice extend far beyond your T.V. screen.

Manufacturing Consent

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explicate the development and aims of the public relations (advertising) industry and link it to the increasing sophistication of political propaganda distribution in the 20th century.

Advertisers create uninformed consumers who make irrational decisions, contravening one of the fundamental principles of market economics (that economic decisions are driven by informed consumers behaving rationally). For instance, if CocaCola was trying to inform a rational consumer, they would talk about the health implications of their product and the features that distinguish their product from that of their competitors. Instead they surround their product with image and rhetoric, generating an abstraction that can be widely disseminated. If Lincoln Motors was trying to appeal to your logical side, they’d feature an ‘expert’ or a series of statistics that prove a Lincoln sedan is a superior investment. But they don’t. Instead Matthew McConaughey says sexy things in sexy ways, and people are seduced into their purchase.

In the same vein, mainstream media outlets create an uninformed electorate who makes irrational decisions. Take Fox News. On the establishment left it is commonly understood that Fox News uses sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant to alter their viewership’s perception of current events and policy. It is also understood to a lesser degree that these viewers support administrations and consequently policies that don’t support their best interests. Tax reform comes to mind as the most obvious example. The liberal intellectual class also perceives the establishment right as serving the interests of large multinational corporations, traditionally identifying oil companies and military contractors, but more recently the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Fox fights tooth and nail to divert attention away from these issues to focus on such pressing matters as the almost hysterical defense of perceived American culture and values.

But there is little self-reflection on the part of the liberal intellectual class as to the sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant used to divert their attention away from pressing issues. These issues, if addressed in policy and action, would threaten the primacy of the corporations who consume and hoard disproportionate amounts of resources and also guide policy and decision making.

The evidence is on the front page of mainstream newspapers every day. Or rather it isn’t. Climate change doesn’t get nearly the coverage it deserves. A recent article in the L.A. Times even cited an academic who argued for the reversibility of the trend, though overwhelming scholarship suggests its disastrous inevitability. Many large corporations would have to undergo expensive overhauls or be abandoned altogether in order to contend with the restrictions of radical climate policy, and the minimal and slanted coverage even in a supposedly left-leaning periodical like the Los Angeles Times is reflective of an attempt to divert public attention away from a pressing issue.

Wealth inequality as a structural flaw inherent to capitalism is never supported in print, and presidential candidates who advocate for a radical departure from the doctrinal status quo are given minimal coverage and dismissed as idealistic, ineffective, or worse. On the other hand, corporate executives who have accumulated obscene amounts of capital are often painted as societal leaders and their opinions are given weight and legitimacy, though their interests differ radically from the vast majority of the publication’s readership. A recent article in the Washington Post, titled “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich” questioned the effectiveness of establishing a wealth tax on the grounds that it would be hard to value assets and that it would encounter constitutional opposition. Despite the more fundamental questions surrounding the construction of the U.S. constitution and the landed interests it was meant to promote, there is a more obvious problem with this analysis. If it’s so easy to value my assets and tax me, why aren’t their preexisting mechanisms in place to value and tax the wealthiest members of our society?

The media’s coverage of American aggression abroad is a topic that Chomsky has covered extensively in numerous books and lectures. Much like wealth inequality and climate change, American aggression is portrayed with remarkable similarity across the limited political spectrum of the mainstream media. To take a particularly egregious example, during and after the American attack on Vietnam, the mainstream media portrayed the ‘mission’ as a tactical blunder undertaken with the best intentions, a sincere but poorly executed attempt to spread democracy. However the public and internal records paint a dire picture, where the ‘war’ itself amounted to genocide and was preceeded by nearly a decade of U.S. backed terrorism and repression. American policy consistently ignored the peace sought on both sides of the developing conflict, prioritizing an ultimate ‘victory’ which involved Vietnam’s complete submission to the political and economic dictates of the United States.

American war crimes and international violations are studiously ignored across the board, whether they take place in POW camps during World War II, in bombings over the skies of Indochina, coups and military operations sponsored by the U.S. in Central America, and the list goes on. Covert operations and military aid to oppressive autocratic regimes that were often propped up by the U.S. in the first place are given little to no space or critical evaluation. And the very reasonable American public opinions on such trivial matters as military spending and military interventionism is ignored. The mainstream media’s coverage of foreign affairs generates the sort of patriotic fervor and conditioned fear that blinds Americans to the human and financial costs of warfare and aggression abroad. In the current climate as in years past, fear of Russian and Chinese state and economic power is often the subject of intense journalistic focus, greasing the wheels for the ceaseless operation of the military-industrial complex as it is justified in print and on the air over and over again.

The consistency among corporately-owned news outlets that claim vast political differences cannot be overemphasized. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model provide a convincing framework for explaining this phenomenon. The network of associations that define media ownership and stewardship of these corporate outlets sheds further light on the complex interplay of power that exists at the top of the corporate world.

Media Ownership and Stewardship

Explicit ownership of a news outlet no longer has sole explanatory power in analyzing how a media outlet behaves. Arthur O. Sulzberger may have some say in what is published in the New York Times, but there is a dense network of corporate relationships that bolsters the institution and guides its decision making. Each mainstream media outlet is not only owned by an individual, family or parent corporation, but also advised by a group of representatives from some of the largest corporations in the American lexicon.

The Sulzberger family has owned the New York Times since 1896, which should send up some red flags. But The New York Times Company Board of Directors also has members associated with McDonald’s, Verizon, Nike, Facebook, Expedia, Etsy, Sony, Pandora, as well as a visiting professor of Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at the University of Oxford.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon owns the Washington Post. You’ll find board members associated with General Motors, Xerox, Johnson and Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, a $70bn investment-fund, a large insurance company, and SurveyMonkey.com, which I imagine is capable of gathering massive amounts of data on public opinion.

The Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the president of SoftBank investment fund, which nets $32bn in sales every year and is a virtual god in the world of tech investment. I couldn’t find a board of directors for the Los Angeles Times online.

I won’t bother looking into Fox. Everyone knows how that will turn out.

The mechanisms used to manipulate public opinion have gotten infinitely more sophisticated since William Randolph Hearst’s time, though control of the mainstream media today is similarly plutocratic. In the age of big data, the aim and ability to manipulate public opinion should come across as a terrifying feature of the American public discourse. Take Facebook, for example. It is clear how much power even a foreign government can have on American public opinion, regardless of whether or not Trump actively contributed to the Russian misinformation effort. I shudder to think about the powerful effect corporations and other powerful institutions will have on the outcome of this election using the mainstream media.

Conclusion

In the same way that advertisers manufacture the desire for their product by feeding you sensory data, corporately owned news outlets manufacture consent for harmful government policies by publishing information strategically. What’s scarier than the monopolistic bent of marketing-heavy corporations is the transformation of corporate-political propaganda into a hard science. Poll after poll, study after study, has helped to refine the art of public persuasion. This might not seem relevant during a contentious presidential election. Just mute the TV during commercials, right? But the science under development in the public relations industry has always shared close ties with corporate power, and by connection media and politics.

There doesn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. There doesn’t have to be a dark room full of whispered commands. But there is an identifiable pattern of power and influence that permeates the mainstream media; a pattern that can be reframed as a centuries-long marketing campaign to suit the interests of a global class of plutocrats.

Corporations donate to election campaigns for the same reason they place representatives on the boards of major media outlets. They want control over policy and control over public opinion. And though there are a lot of different organizations competing for this privileged access to media and governmental influence, their interests are often aligned. They cooperate across the limited political spectrum of American media to temper rising racial and class awareness.

Though it is subtle, you can identify it with the right questions. Why does the mainstream media only cover a social movement like the Civil Rights Movement and the resistance to the Vietnam War, or more recently the Black Lives Matter or #MeToo movements when they become too powerful to ignore? Why isn’t economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, racial inequality, or climate change the front page story every day, when they’re clearly the most dire threats to the vast majority of people in the short and long-term? Advocating strongly for these issues goes against the best interests and likely the nature of a small yet powerful class of business super-elites. They cooperate to varying degrees on key issues producing a remarkable degree of consistency across the spectrum, from the New York Times to Fox News.

Salt in the Wounded Knee: Psychopathy in the Commemoration of Genocide

By Sonasha Braxton

Hannibal Lecter, Jason Voorhees, Norman Bates. What do these people have in common? They tormented us in our dreams. There was something particularly callous in the way that they engaged in their homicidal acts, which left us shuddering. Cold, calculated, without remorse or feeling, we might casually call them psychopathic. But what actually is "psychopathy"? Psychopathy assessed with the PCL-R 9 [1] includes a grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of remorse or guilt, lack of empathy, and failure to accept responsibility for actions. Does anything about the history of the United States, more specifically its celebration of holidays, makes sense within the context of this symptomology? While we could most certainly name quite a few, let us take for example just two holidays, Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day. To understand how the celebration of each of these holidays resembles psychopathy, then we must have a clear comprehension of the history and reason for celebration.

Columbus Day

The Myth: In fourteen hundred ninety-two,/Columbus sailed the ocean blue/ He had three ships and left from Spain/ He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain … /Ninety sailors were on board;/ Some men worked while others snored … / Day after day they looked for land;/ They dreamed of trees and rocks and sand./ October 12 their dream came true,/ You never saw a happier crew!/ " Indians! Indians!" Columbus cried;/His heart was filled with joyful pride./ But "India" the land was not;/ It was the Bahamas, and it was hot./ The Arakawa natives were very nice;/ They gave the sailors food and spice./ Columbus sailed on to find some gold/To bring back home, as he'd been told./ He made the trip again and again,/ Trading gold to bring to Spain./ The first American? No, not quite./ But Columbus was brave, and he was bright. [2]

Exclusionary Detailing

Many of us may be familiar with this poem. I remember learning it at some point in my actually quite progressive elementary school. Columbus's first voyage had about 90 men. Some men probably snored. It is possible they dreamed of sand. It is more than likely they were quite happy when they reached land. They were not in India. The indigenous Arawak population gave them gifts and Columbus did come back. I deny none of the veracity of the poem. But I do have questions, like why it exists. Why is it taught to children in an educative setting? While it is only a children's rhyme, it is the omissions, and the implied "happily ever after" that beyond problematic, are in fact quite insidious. Almost immediately after meeting the "very nice" Arawak natives, the rhyme conveniently ends, thus implying that this is the conclusion, when it most certainly is not. It is selective, exclusionary detailing, where the most important facts simply are not there. One might argue that a children's rhyme should not include a story about mass murder, and therefore the rhyme appropriate as-is. To this I would reply that there should be no children's rhymes about mass murderers. For those of us who best understand the deplorability of such when compared to the Jewish experience, allow me to ask, were you ever taught a delightful ditty about Hitler in primary school, which talked about his mustache, what he dreamed about, and how smart he was, and then conveniently left out the Holocaust?

A Truth

In Columbus and his crew's multiple interactions with the Indigenous People, the word "discovery", while now admittedly less widely circulated, is still used erroneously in describing Columbus's encounters with several Caribbean islands, and countries in Central America. Columbus never saw the present day United States. He embarked on four different voyages while looking for the "East Indies", in search of King Solomon's gold mines, riches, and a route to India. By accident, he stumbled upon the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, and parts of North Eastern Central America. Much of what we know about the atrocities Columbus committed against the indigenous Arawak/Taino populations was documented by Bartolome de Las Casas, a Spanish Historian and Dominican Friar in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. [3] Take for example the following quotes from the book:

" The Christians with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among [the Arawak]. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor those in child labour, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated as though they were assaulting so many lambs herded in their sheepfold "

" In this Kingdom or (I'm certain) in some Province of New Spain, A Spaniard Hunting and intent on his game, phancyed that his Beagles wanted food; and to supply their hunger snatcht a young little Babe from the Mothers breast, cutting off his Arms and Legs, cast a part of them to every Dog, which they having devour'd, he threw the remainder of the Body to them. "

" [The Spaniards] made bets as to who would slit a man in two or cut off his head at one blow: or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother ' s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks … They ' spitted ' the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers on their swords … They made a gallows just high enough for the feet to nearly touch the ground … they put wood underneath and with fire, they burned the Indians alive " .

In one incident, a member of Columbus's crew "drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill a group of Taino … roasted them, cut off their hands and burned them alive"

" [the Spanish] rode the backs of the Indians as if they were in a hurry, " and they " thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. "

As if this were not enough, rape too was a common occurrence. In 1493, Columbus had already began rewarding members of his crew with Arawak/Taino women to rape. This was not simply confined to women, but extended to pre-pubescent girls. In Columbus's own words he stated "… girls… from 9-10 … are … in demand" .[4] In one single day, de Las Casas saw Columbus's soldiers "dismember, behead or rape 3,000 natives". It is clear that the Arawak/Taino population were not considered sufficiently human to be treated as such. And distant from the eyes of the crown, no one policed Colmbus nor his crew's despicable moral engagement with the people he miraculously discovered and subsequently made extinct.

The Tribute and Encomienda Systems

In 1495 Columbus created the "tribute system" in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Hispaniola). Columbus at this time, still seeking the source of gold that he had not yet managed to find, implemented a system in which non-compliance, resistance, or inability to produce the expected results, bore the consequence of torture and capital punishment. According to Ferdinand Columbus, Columbus's son, "[The Indians] all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were located, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be punished" . [5] The punishment was that those who did not provide sufficient gold every three months, had their hands cut off, and were left to bleed to death. Columbus had grossly overestimated the amount of gold that existed and it soon became clear that he had to exploit the Arawak/Taino by other means in order to reap profit. By then over 10,000 Arawak/Taino had been killed this way. Thus the encomienda system was created around the time of Columbus's third voyage.

There are a variety of arguments which examine if the encomienda system was actually slavery. These become important because this distinction contributed directly to the total extinction of the Arawak/Taino population; encomienderos did not own the Arawak/Taino, so they could not be bought or sold. The encomiendas were not inheritable by subsequent generations. And the Indigenous populations could not be moved from one geographical location to another. [6] Because the Arawak/Taino were not inheritable under the encomienda system, there was no impetus for the conquistadors to keep the Indigenous people alive. If the Arawak/Taino attempted to escape, they were hunted and killed. Thus the system thus sought to regulate Indigenous labor and behavior, in order to profit the conquistadors. Under the encomienda system, encomienderos received grants of a number of Arawak/Taino, from whom they could exact "tribute" in the form of gold or labor. In turn, the benevolent encomienderos were supposed to "protect" the physical bodies of the Indigenous population on the very land they had stolen from them, as well as "protect" their immortal souls by Christianizing them. This was a lose-lose for the Indigenous people who in an exchange under duress, gained the bible, and lost their land, many spiritual concepts, language, history, and lives.

Another untold story is that of the Indigenous resistance. Even when aspects of the true history of Columbus's genocide are told, the narrative is one written in the passive voice, in which Indigenous people, are not the agents, rather the objects, and one which excludes their narratives of resistance and survival. The Arawak/Taino fought back frequently in multiple uprisings and even the "Indian wars" on Hispaniola. However, the conquistadors had the advantage of "advanced" weaponry. The conquistadors deterred future uprisings by torturing and killing prisoners of war in the way de Las Casas described. This was by no means unfamiliar to the conquistadors as the exact same system had been used against the Black Moors in Spain.

Slavery and Capitalism

Columbus, who had already been engaged in slave trade on the West African coast years prior, familiar with systemic dehumanization, and the encomienda system's success against the Moors in Spain, became one the most "successful" European slave traders in the Americas. The Spanish, under the leadership of Columbus, selected 500 Arawak/Taino to be sent to Spain as enslaved people (of whom less than half survived the journey). In 1493 there were approximately 8 million Arawak/Taino. The disease that the conquistadors brought with them, combined with the destruction of the ecosystem by European livestock and rodents and the intentional systemic genocide of the Arawak/Taino people resulted in a population of 100,000 remaining by 1504.

Having nearly totally depleted the Arawak/Taino population, and the conquistadors unwilling to do the work themselves, Columbus continued to look for an alternative work force to exploit in the gold and silver mines and in agriculture. The "protector of the Indians" Bartolome de Las Casas initially supported the idea that African enslaved people be used to replace the massacred Arawak/Taino. Columbus had created the perfect model for other Europeans who were fast on his heels to guarantee their own wealth in the "New World". The same method of dehumanizing, destroying, murdering, and enslaving Arawak/Taino was used with the enslaved African population. The encomienda system was done away with and the trans-Atlantic slavery system erected in its place. Capitalism built on the backs of Arawak/Taino and African populations became a leading source of Spain's wealth for centuries. By 1555, not a single Arawak/Taino remained.

How it Became a Holiday

In 1828 Washington Irving, perhaps best known for his fictional, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with the same imaginative zest, constructed a purely fictitious account of Christopher Columbus, in A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. In the book Columbus was a brave and benevolent leader who treated the Arawak/Taino with respect, kindness and dignity. This book was responsible for much of the myth-making around who Columbus was, and the ever-present invented version of the man and his legacy. In 1892, president Benjamin Harrison established the day as one to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the Bahamas to spite the British. And in the 1890s large swells of Italian immigrants, who at the time were facing ethnic discrimination in the United States, held tightly to and propagated the image of the great Italian Columbus who had "discovered America" and used it as a way to ease their integration into the United States. By 1972, President Nixon, well-known for his incredibly honest and scrupulous behavior, made it a holiday.

Thanksgiving

The Myth: One hundred two passengers on the ship,/ Sixty-five days was a very long trip./ 'Twas November 11 when there was a shout./ "Land ho! We've made it!" a voice yelled out./ Their very first winter was cold and was gray./ The Pilgrims worked hard in the new land each day./ People got sick and some even died./ Still others continued to work side by side./ To the Pilgrims, Squanto was a teacher and friend./ He helped them from sunrise until each day's end./ He told them to plant corn in rows long and narrow./ He taught them to hunt with a bow and an arrow./ When the leaves once again turned gold in the fall,/ Enough food for the winter was stored up for all./ The Pilgrims felt joy they wanted to share./ They wanted their Indian friends to be there./ There were tables piled high with fish and with meat./ Vegetables, fruits, and good things to eat./ The Pilgrims gave thanks for all that they had. / Pilgrims and Indians together were glad.

Another Truth

Like Irving's account of Columbus, this poem goes beyond exclusionary detailing, and is almost pure invention. We can acquiesce certain details like the date, the coldness of the winter, and Squanto's teaching the Pilgrims how to plan corn. But Squanto's relationship to the Pilgrims, how Thanksgiving came about, and most certainly the idea that the "Indians" were somehow "glad" is pure fallacy. Prior to the Pilgrims' arrival John Smith and the colony at Jamestown had already set an early precedent for the Indigenous encounter. In summation, the English colonists who arrived in the United States, were always wholly unprepared for the harsh conditions they would find upon arrival, and in their times of desperation, reverted to animalistic means of survival, including cannibalism. Captain John Smith wrote, "So great was our famine that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; and so did divers ones another boiled and stewed with herbs. And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powdered her and had eaten part of her" [7]

For the Pilgrims in particular, after a series of successions of the throne, feeling that their religious beliefs were resulting in persecution, and seeking potential wealth and a fresh start in the "New World," they left South Hampton, England in the Mayflower with a total of 102 people. After about two months the ship landed in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. On December 16, 1920, according to the dark humor of Will Rogers, the Pilgrims "fell upon their knees… then fell upon the aborigines". [8] The Pilgrims, unused to the harsh winter, incapable of finding food on their own, with little idea how to engage in agriculture, lost about half of their population. At that time, the Pilgrims were half-crazed from loss, grief, hunger, and their unpredictable and consistent deaths. George Thorpe, wrote a first-hand account of what he witnessed, stating "more do die here of the disease of the mind than of the body" [9]

Enter Squanto (Tisquantum), whose existence is highly contested. If and when the "friendly savage" appeared, he was not seen as a teacher and friend but rather a clear sign of God's deliverance, as Squanto was a baptized, educated, English-speaking Christian. What more lucid sign of God's favor? Squanto, who had been formerly enslaved by John Smith's men was able to escape to England and return to the U.S. to find most of his tribe had been wiped out by the Plague. Members of the Pokaoket and other tribes, having lived in the area over 10,000 years were also able to communicate with the Europeans as they had already had interactions with European fishermen. They taught the colonists how to plant and where to hunt fish and beaver. In fall of 1621, Governor Bradford of Massachusetts issued a proclamation calling for a three-day feast to commemorate the first harvest and survival throughout the winter, to which the Wampanoag were invited in order to negotiate a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims and to be placated to ensure the Pilgrims' survival.[10] Perhaps it was a feast in the name of brotherhood, but with dual and duplicitous intentions.

More ships came. The Pilgrim settlement expanded exponentially. European-borne diseases spread rampantly through the Indigenous population, killing them off with precision. There were multiple tribes living in the area, each with particular alliances with one another. As tribes engaged in numerous alliances with the Pilgrims, relations were ruptured amongst the other Indigenous American tribes living in the area, and power differentials substantially altered.

In 1637, when the first, officially proclaimed "Thanksgiving" took place another event was actually celebrated. At that feast, the New England colonists celebrated their massacre of the Pequots in the Connecticut Valley. William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the Anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, says that the first official Thanksgiving Day celebrated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during their annual Green Corn Dance…[11] William Bradford, the former Governor of Plymouth and one of the chroniclers described it in the following detail:

" Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire … horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory. " [12]

Once the Pilgrims had become self-sufficient, their reliance on the Indigenous population dwindled. In 1675, continued aggression by the European invaders led to King Phillip's war, resulting in the massacre of over 3000 Indigenous people and about 1000 Pilgrims. At the end of the conflict most of the surviving Indigenous population were either hung, burned, killed or sold into slavery in the Carolinas. The enslavement of Indigenous people was highly successful, but raiding the Ivory Coast of Africa to enslave Africans and sell to the Southern colonies proved even more successful, and thus perpetuated the trade of enslaved Africans and their uncelebrated Holocaust.[13]

While in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, it had already been celebrated annually for centuries. Dr. Ishakamusa Barashango sums up what Thanksgiving celebration is quite nicely, describing it as "a holiday celebrating the beginning of the almost total extermination of an entire race of people, commonly called "Indians" and the enslavement, continued oppression and genocide of the Afrikan, by European settlers". [14]

Whitewashing Genocide

Article 2 of the The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births; (e) forcibly transferring children from one group to another group". [15] Given the history of the calculated intent of destroying in whole or in part both Indigenous and African people, there is no doubt that both of these holidays are based in historical genocide. The colonists cut off hands, fed babies to dogs, raped and sold children, and burned people alive. The Indigenous Holocaust and even embryonic stages of the African Holocaust, are the epitome of genocide. However, the truth is conveniently erased from the rhymes that are taught in class, and in its place a revisionist victor's history, which not only scrubs away the horrendous war crimes perpetrated by the English and Spanish invaders, but takes a white paintbrush and layers it finely in a beautiful coat of glorification. In celebration, the U.S. not only honors genocide, but its literal whitewashing as well.

Colonization of Narrative

The idea that we live in a post-colonial society, is perhaps as ridiculous as the thought that we live in a post-racial society. We cannot separate the repercussions and systemic infrastructure built as a result of the exploitative nature of the European encounter, from colonialism itself. Colonialism is a dynamic process, not simply a static moment in time that has now passed. And just as colonialism exists as the exploitation and subsequent domination of a people, it is just as assuredly a domination of history and narrative. To the victor goes the spoils and the rights for the victor to write history however he likes. The loss of ownership of one's own narrative, a narrative of genocide and resistance, especially in favor of one that honors the sordid actions of the victor's in triumph over the defeated, is surely salt in the wound of an already grotesque injury. The narrative represents an interactive relationship between the teller and the listener. The teller (dominant U.S culture) exercises its power over the controlled narrative and to some extent the audience, by legitimizing 1) its right to tell the story and 2) the truthfulness of the narrative [16]. The colonization of the Indigenous and African destruction and resistance narrative, using the fallacious "discovery narrative" thus honors manifest destiny, imperialist occupation, and dehumanization of "the other".

Collective Memory and American Identity

The way in which events are remembered has particular importance, especially within the context of celebratory ritual within American (U.S.) cultural memory. Cultural memory relates to fixed points of the past… "whose memory is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)" called figures of memory. [17] These figures of memory, the observance of celebration, Columbus and Thanksgiving poems, festivals, parades, etc., create "islands of a completely different temporality suspended from time" which maintain preservation. The memory is not questioned, as the narrative, dominated by the conquerer, is clear. This cultural memory provides "concretion of identity or the relation to the group… from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity" [18]. Thus the reconstructed narrative supports the cultural memory which supports the construction of American identity and our normative self-image as independent, brave, righteous and benevolent. This is then reinforced by the ritual celebration.

Equally important are the existence of various forms of denial and silence. In response to blatant historical violence, the U.S. has exercised both literal and interpretive denial in collective forgetting. This manifests on a spectrum from wholesale literal denial, "that genocide never happened" to the deliberate construction of historical violence "in ways that make them appear less atrocious". [19] " Silence and forgetting also result from particular forms of presence or mention that transform potentially threatening events into transgression-denying objects" . [20] This is calling genocide an "encounter" or using "meeting" to replace "massacre". Perhaps most reprehensible continues to be the anti-silence, which is the commemorative glorification of genocide exercising both literal and interpretive denial.

That Country Crazy.

In the DSM-V "antisocial personality disorder" has replaced the "psychopathy" diagnosis. It provides multiple areas of dysfunction which meet the criteria for this particular psychopathology. Let's see how the U.S. fares with respect to just the two discussed holidays:

"Ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power, or pleasure. Goal-setting based on personal gratification; The colonists (to be Americans) came to the "New World" for gold, the acquisition of a different socio-economic level, or power their religion did not allow them to exercise in England.

Empathy: Lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others; lack of remorse after hurting or mistreating another. The colonists exterminated millions of Indigenous people, and initiated the Indigenous and African slave trade as well as the Indigenous and African Holocausts and didn't seem too concerned about it.

Antagonism, characterized by: Manipulativeness, dishonesty, callousness and disinhibition:

The colonists used the Indigenous population's assistance for their own survival…then killed them. They created narratives which became holidays that destructed truth and reconstructed a collective cultural memory of benevolence as well as a cultural amnesia around the genocide. The U.S. continues to celebrate and commemorate these genocides annually with turkey and parades.

So What...?

The influence of American (U.S) culture is not always obvious. Many of us fully embrace it and many of us deliberately remove ourselves from it, denouncing citizenship, changing our last names, consider ourselves part of it solely by hyphenation, or understand ourselves as distinct from it due to lack of legal recognition of citizenship. But we cannot escape from it. We drive to work in it. We must operate in its systems. We use its currency. We breathe its air. We pay its bills. We bury our heads in work that funds it. We get lost in its distractions. We depend on its functionality for our survival. We celebrate its holidays. Yet if we think critically about why we engage in celebration we might consider also calling these reasons crazy, insane, pathological, and an affront to both indigeneity and humanity.

The narrative of resistance exists, but is rarely told. There are numerous active Global Indigenous Advocacy networks.There have been multiple Indigenous-led movements which have successfully changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, such as in Seattle, Washington. Similarly cities and towns in the United States have adopted resolutions to change the day's name. On October 12th, Venezuela celebrates the Day of Indigenous Resistance. Thousands march in Chile in what the people celebrate as the Day of Mapuche Resistance. The American Indian Movement (AIM) has been actively engaged in petitioning government to make Thanksgiving a day of mourning. Colonialism has evolved from slavery and small pox blankets. It now unashamedly offers neo-liberal policies in the name of economic globalization, which continue to result in illegal acquisition of land, deprivation of resources and human casualties. And there continue to be countless examples of both armed and unarmed Indigenous resistance occurring throughout America, from Canada to the Cape Horn. Indigenous people did and are resisting occupation of their lands and transnational exploitation of resources, despite the frequent disproportional militarized response to their demands.

So sitting in traffic at the Columbus Day parade, or even while we are having a huge meal with our families, let's take a few seconds to be a little pensive. If perhaps, we are not willing to give up the perks of our day off, or if we use the celebration as a time to be with family or reflect on gratitude, we can also be curious about how we do so in a way that acknowledges that the struggle for Indigenous liberation is pulsing vigorously. We can challenge the dominant narrative, our distorted cultural memory and resultantly our own (inextricably) American identities, and we can reshape them. If indeed practices of commemoration "provide a unified sense of who we are now and project a sense of collective purpose into the future" [21] then we must approach psychopathy with the intention of constructing an identity that is both principled and "sane", and a future purpose which is directed towards being honest in this world by honoring complete truths however vicious or painful these may be.

Oh yeah. Happy Thanksgiving.

Notes

[1] Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised. http://www.minddisorders.com/knowledge/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist.html

[2] http://www.teachingheart.net/columbus.htm

[3] Casas, B., & Griffin, N. (1992). A short account of the destruction of the Indies. London, England: Penguin Books.

[4] Loewen, J. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: New Press

[5] ibid

[6] Yeager, T. J.. (1995). Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown's Choice of Labor Organization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. The Journal of Economic History, 55(4), 842-859. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2123819

[7] The General History of Virginia Fourth Book p. 294 (1606-1625)

[8] Deloria, V. (2002). The Indian Reorganization Act: Congresses and bills. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

[9] Rogers, J.A. Africa's gift to America: the Afro-American in the making and saving of the United States : with new supplement, Africa and its potentialities. (1961). St. Petersburg, FL: Helga Rogers Publishing

[10] http://historyofmassachusetts.org/squanto-the-former-slave/

[11] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/10176871/ns/msnbc-the_ed_show/t/thanksgiving-day-time-mourn/#.Vkko7q6rQXo

[12] Donald, G. (2009). Lies, damned lies, and history: A catalogue of historical errors and misunderstandings. Stroud: History Press.

[13] Jennings, F. (1975). The invasion of America: Indians, colonialism, and the cant of conquest. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press.

[14] Barashango, I. (1979). Afrikan people and European holidays: A mental genocide. Silver Spring, MD: IVth Dynasty Pub.

[15] United Nations General Assembly. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

[16] Anna De Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. (2011). Narrative power, authority and ownership. In: Analyzing Narrative. pp. 125-154. [Online]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available from: Cambridge Books Online <http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139051255.008> [Accessed 15 November 2015].

[17] Collective Memory and Cultural Identity Jan Assmann; John Czaplicka New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies. (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 125-133.

[18] ibid

[19] Kurtiş, T., Adams, G., & Bird, M. (2010). Generosity or genocide? Identity implications of silence in American Thanksgiving commemorations. Memory, 18(2), 208-224

[20] ibid

[21] ibid

Will Black Nationalism Reemerge?

By Sean Posey

In the summer of 2008, a tidal wave of liberal and youth activists began to carry presidential candidate Barack Obama on a journey leading inexorably to the White House. Town halls and campaign stops attracted droves of admirers-with Obama taking on a persona more akin to a rock star than to a senator from Illinois. However, during a campaign stop in St. Petersburg, something unexpected happened. Obama was greeted during a question and answer session by protesters carrying a sign emblazoned with the question, "What about the Black Community, Obama?"

After attempting to ask Obama questions, and after getting shouted down by the crowd, Diop Olugbala, one of the protesters, confronted Obama asking, "In the face of the numerous attacks that are made against the African community or the black community by the same US government that you aspire to lead. . . why is it that you have not had the ability to not one time speak to the interests and even speak on the behalf of the oppressed and exploited African community or Black community in this country?"[1]

Obama seemed flustered. This was a rare, pointed question about what his campaign would mean for the black community. The young questioner was a member of the Uhuru Movement, a Pan-African organization representing one of the remnants of Black Nationalism in the United States. The incident was laughed off and Uhuru jokingly dismissed. However, as the Obama administration moves through its last term, it's clear the question posed by Uhuru will not go away, especially as the wider black community faces continued socioeconomic problems. This poses a broader question: Is Black Nationalism relevant in the twenty-first century? And as the crisis facing black America builds, will it reemerge?

Origins/Development of Black Nationalism

The origins of Black Nationalism can't be separated from the experience of slavery. Since Africans were first brought to the colonies, a common racial oppression produced calls for not only a release from slavery, but for repatriation to Africa, or to some other place where a black nation might be formed. This ideology also embraced Pan-Africanism, or the idea that black unity must be a worldwide affair. Men and women alike championed early Black Nationalism: Paul Cuffee helped ferry formers slaves to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone; Robert Alexander Young wrote the 1829 "Ethiopian Manifesto," which spoke to the commonality of blacks in the Diaspora; and Maria W. Stewart became the first woman to espouse nationalist ideas in speeches and writings. All of these activists and thinkers represented early yearnings for black autonomy and nation building.

The compromise of 1850 helped reinforce Black Nationalism. This is the beginning of what William Moses-perhaps the foremost scholar on the subject-calls the "Golden Age of Black Nationalism," which lasted until the imprisonment of Marcus Garvey in 1925.[2] During this period people like Martin Delaney, the "Grandfather of Black Nationalism," made plans to relocate African Americans back to the Africa. Nationalism also took hold among very educated "elites." Whereas Black Nationalism in Garvey's time, and later during the 1960s, came primarily from the working class, some of the most bourgeois and formally educated African Americans in the nineteenth century espoused emigration schemes and black self-sufficiency.[3]

The emergence of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League in 1914 marked the beginning of the largest movement of blacks in American history. Garvey drew on Pan-Africanism and wanted ultimately to move African Americans back to Africa, but he also advanced the idea of black economic self-sufficiency as a principal part of the UNIA platform.[4] Garveyism specifically represented two of the three main strands of Black Nationalism: cultural and political nationalism. Garvey's Negro Factories Corporation manufactured black dolls, sponsored black beauty contests, and published high-fashion photos of black women.[5] The Negro Factories Corporation also started black-owned neighborhood businesses to provide services to communities like Harlem.

Garvey's enormous popularity drew the wrath of other black intellectuals-especially W.E.B. Du Bois. However, despite their differences, Du Bois and his rival Booker T. Washington also espoused ideas consistent with Black Nationalism. Washington advocated a "technocratic Black Nationalism" that did not call for political or social integration but instead espoused a "do for self" model of black economic empowerment. [6] Du Bois was much more of a cultural nationalist.[7] Though seemingly mutually opposed to each other, both advocated black pride and support for the growth of black-owned businesses. It was only after the jailing of Garvey-on flimsy charges-and the decline of the UNIA that class issues fractured Black Nationalism. The working class would become the center of future nationalist revivals in the 1930s and 1960s.

Nationalism and Religion

The third main strand of Black Nationalism, religious nationalism, flourished in the years after Garvey's fall. The Moorish Science Temple gathered a strong following in the 1920s and 1930s. The founder of the temple, Noble Drew Ali, blended Black Nationalism with mysticism and Islamic thought, prefiguring the most successful of the religious nationalist groups-the Nation of Islam. The NOI formed in Depression-era Detroit. Shrouded in mysticism itself, the organization grew in the poorest and most deprived slums of the industrial cities of the north. The group's leader, Elijah Muhammad, held up blacks as "the original man," and he called for the creation of an independent black state within the borders of the United States. Despite their ideological and cultural differences, the Nation of Islam, and especially Malcolm X, had a large influence on the Black Power movement of the 1960s.

Black Power

The Black Power movement of the 1960s seemed to come out of nowhere for many Americans, but Black Power descends directly from the long history of Black Nationalism. Stokely Carmichael, who coined the term Black Power, stated, "…Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close its ranks."[8] This harkened back to Garveyism, but it opened up the possibility of eventual integration of some kind. Marxism and class analysis also came to influence the Black Power movement. This proved especially true of the Black Panthers, who eschewed nationalism while also representing many of its major strands.

The success of the civil rights movement during the 1960s had little impact on the economic and cultural issues brewing in America's inner cities. Urban riots were the result of complicated problems the mainstream civil rights movement was unable to address: The NAACP and the Urban League represented an emerging black middle class; street level movements represented a discontented working class. The struggle between the civil rights movement and Black Power moved into the culture as well. "New ways of being black" played a huge role in groups like the Black Panthers, whose emphasis on a "revolutionary culture" were explicitly anti-capitalist. That separated them from both mainstream black organizations and previous Black Nationalist groups. [9] The Black Arts movement and cultural movement slogans such as "Black is Beautiful" also came primarily from Black Nationalist groups. Attempts to build economically self-sufficient black communities, calls for black separatism, and explicit rejections of white culture, continued well into the mid-1970s.

Afrocentrism, "Conscious" Hip Hop, and the "Under Class"

Nationalism faded rapidly after the 1970s. Class fissures and emerging opportunities for some African Americans took the wind out of the movement. It was Afrocentrism, a relic of the cultural nationalist movements of the 1960s that remained vital in the 1980s and 1990s. Scholars of Afrocentrism sought to build an epistemology around African ways of thinking. As political scientist Dean Robinson describes it, these scholars tried "…to denote a new African-centered perspective, one shorn of problematic 'Eurocentric' assumptions, and one fashioned to produce more accurate and sympathetic assessments of African life."[10] Maulana Karenga, whose holiday of Kwanzaa emanated from the cultural nationalist ethos of the sixties, remains the most famous of the Afrocentric scholars. The continued popularity in some circles of Afrocentrism in the 1980s and 1990s partially masked the decline of other forms of nationalism and the structural economic and social inequality affecting African Americans.

The promise of the civil rights movement-especially the promise of economic justice-never filtered down to the ghettos of America's cities. In the 1980s, the emerging musical genre of hip-hop came to reflect many of the ideals of Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism. Hip-hop channeled the frustrations of urban youth who found themselves left out of the economic growth of that decade. In 1980, an effort between Brother D and a group called the Collective spawned what was one of the first "conscious" tracts. The song "How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?" represented the beginning of a sub-genre called "conscious hip-hop", which included many strains of Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism. Adherents of the Five-Percent Nation-an offshoot of the Nation of Islam-were and are well represented in conscious hip-hop. Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation, Paris, Brand Nubian, and especially Public Enemy, represented core groups that formed a culturally and politically nationalist semi-rebirth that in some ways reflected the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. With the commercialization of hip-hop in the late eighties and early nineties, Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism went underground. Gangsta rap proved more suited to the rampant individualism that pervaded hip-hop and the larger culture in the latter-1990s.

The Working Class and the New Jim Crow

Initiatives taken in the wake of the civil rights movement increased access to jobs in municipal governments and in the public sector for blacks. This formed the backbone of the new black middle class; however, the ghettos that fostered the Black Nationalism of the late sixties remained far behind. America's deindustrialized urban areas continued to collapse during the 1970s and 1980s. Violent crime, the crack cocaine epidemic, gangs, and the spread of jobless neighborhoods have now devastated several generations of the black working class; and though the cycle has diminished in intensity, it remains a central truth. In the 1990s, historian Michael Katz expounded on the structural reality of poverty and blackness in America: "Because racism directed toward African Americans is so powerful, the contemporary fusion of race and poverty remains the most resilient and vicious in American history." [11]

The reality of ghetto poverty today is as powerful a force as ever, and one of the strongest reinforcing mechanisms for it is the prison system. Sociologist Loic Wacquant sees the modern or "hyper ghetto" as part of a symbiotic relationship with the prison system, or a "kinship," as he calls it. [12] Since the 1970s the American prison system has gone from being about 70 percent white to about 70 percent non-white, with blacks making up forty percent of state and federal prisoners.[13] Michelle Alexander succinctly dubs this system the "New Jim Crow."[14]

Wacquant argues the failure of the urban ghetto to contain African Americans in the late 1960s led to, by way of "Law and Order" campaigns and the War on Drugs, the affinity between the hyper ghetto and the prison system. According to Wacquant, "They (whites) extended enthusiastic support for the 'law-and-order' policies that vowed to firmly repress urban disorders connately perceived as racial threats. Such policies pointed to yet another special institution capable of confining and controlling if not the entire African-American community, at least its most disruptive, disreputable and dangerous members: the prison." Black Nationalist groups were firmly among the groups considered most dangerous to the state in this scenario.

Liberalism and the Failure of the Second Reconstruction

The failure of liberalism and the stalled Second Reconstruction leave African Americans in an increasingly precarious position at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The promise of the historic election-and re-election-of Barack Obama has proved illusory. As Obama moves into his second term, black unemployment is actually worse than when he was sworn in. Almost every socioeconomic measure from education to homeownership shows wide disparities between whites and blacks. White median household wealth is 20 times greater than that held by black households.[15] Almost 30 percent of African Americans live below the poverty line, and 40 percent of black children are in poverty. [16] Urban sociologist Patrick Sharkey calls "the failure to complete the progression towards full civil rights" one of the four main trends keeping neighborhood level inequality in place.[17] Yet, no real programs to address urban poverty and disadvantage have existed since the Model Cities initiative of the 1970s. All this leads to the "inheritance of the ghetto" from one generation to the next.

The Remnants of Nationalism

Surviving the decline of Black Power and Black Nationalism in the 1970s, the Nation of Islam continues to be the principle Black Nationalist organization in the country. After the death of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation came under the leadership of his son, Wallace Muhammad, who sought to integrate the organization. The fallout over Wallace's rule split the group. A dynamic speaker named Louis Farrakhan reformed the Nation-bringing it back into line with Elijah Muhammad's original message. Farrakhan entered the national spotlight in the 1980s, becoming primarily known for his often-controversial comments and his efforts to build black economic power. In 1995, Farrakhan and the NOI organized the largest gathering of African Americans in history at the Million Man March.

The Nation thrives working in the most depressed urban areas in the country. Converting ex-convicts and recruiting prisoners was a part of the organization from the very beginning, with Malcolm X being only the most famous of the prisoners turned Muslims. Providing security for troubled public housing projects and policing dangerous streets endeared Farrakhan's organization to residents in areas all but abandoned, or in conflict with, the police. Last summer, as Chicago's homicide rate soared, the Nation organized community patrols and outreach efforts. The well-respected anti-violence organization CeaseFire claims the Nation is becoming intimately involved in combating street violence in Chicago's toughest neighborhoods. [18]

Economic nationalism is also still a crucial part of Farrakhan's plan today. The Nation owns 1,500 acres of farmland in Georgia and is apparently looking to buy thousands of more acres in the Midwest, possibly also including vacant land in places like Detroit. Farrakhan continues to call for blacks to save money, invest in property, and build communal economics. All this comes at a time when median wealth for black families is about $5,600. [19]

Other Black Nationalist movements are either very small or local, or are fractured and ineffectual. The New Black Panther Party, formed in 1989, has garnered major headlines in recent years for its rhetoric and protests at various racial hot spots in the country-including a much ballyhooed voter intimidation case in 2008 that was seized on by the right. The NBP also hosted a "Black Power Convention" in 2010 that attracted ex-politicians like Cynthia McKinney and a variety of entertainers from Erykah Badu to Andre 3000. In September the party will hold a "Million Youth March" in Harlem to address the needs of black youth, especially in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin murder. The party's chairman Malik Shabazz described the effort by saying, "The whole purpose of these events is to establish a strong Black Power Movement across America and the world specifically for the youth." [20] It's unclear, however, how many social programs the NBP has or what level of support it enjoys in the black community.

Black Women and the Middle Class

The patriarchal trappings of the Black Power movement drew a large degree of criticism from black female intellectuals. However, it must be remembered that women from Amy Jacques Garvey to Angela Davis championed key tenants of Black Nationalism. Despite that fact though, black women face an "intersectionality" of both racial and gender oppression.

There has been reluctance by Black Nationalist movements to deal effectively with sexism, misogyny, and homophobia within their own ranks. Historian E. Francis White calls for an expanded and less constrained vision of blackness, one that could accommodate differences of gender and orientation. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins writes of a nationalism that adapts itself to feminist sensitivities. Strides made by black feminists and the gay rights movements will make problematic the rise of any nationalist movement that discounts the desirability of these groups.

The question of the class divide is one that goes back to the days of Garvey or even further. Capitalism has integrated, to a certain extent, the black middle class. Black political power blossomed in many cities and states after the civil rights era, and much of the black bourgeoisie enjoyed an upward mobility unknown to them in the era of segregation. In 1999, over half of African Americans could fit comfortably into the middle class. [21] Yet at the same time the black middle class was in a precarious position.

In a recent groundbreaking book, sociologist Mary Pattilo shows the black middle class tends to live in neighborhoods with substantially higher poverty rates than middle class whites. They also tend to be spatially closer to, or often adjacent to, ghetto neighborhoods. [22] When the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit, most of the hard won gains of the middle class were wiped out. Now even the white middle class is under siege, which means even more pain for the black middle class. Marian Wright Edelman, co-founder of the Children's Defense Fund and a veteran of the civil rights movement, recently said of the emergency facing all of black America, "We face the worst crisis since slavery."[23]

Returning to Black Power?

Shortly before he died, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) said in an interview with C-Span, "Black Power has not been arrived at; we don't have Black Power yet."[24] There is no political will to deal with the catastrophe facing black America. The recent bankruptcy of Detroit, the largest majority black city in the nation, is a potent reminder of that. Indeed, black political power is fading, ironically in the age of the first black president.

Liberal electoral politics by themselves cannot and will not solve these problems, As Dr. Brittney Cooper pointed out after the fiftieth anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom: "Black liberal advocacy in this country for more jobs, less poverty, more education, less prisons, more life chances and less gun deaths doesn't have a fighting chance without a visible radical alternative."[25] Where will this all lead?

Austerity, continued stagnation, and the refusal to address urban and suburban poverty, puts black America at a crossroads. It's unclear what impact the disappointing Obama legacy will have for the future of black politics. Still, regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican occupies the White House in 2017, it's doubtful any agenda addressing black communities will be discussed, much less enacted. In the months and years ahead, it is possible that we will see the rebirth of a new, almost certainly unique and unexpected version of Black Nationalism. If so, it will come at the darkest hour, and if it does-look for it in the whirlwind.

References

[1] Greg Wallace, "What about the Black Community, Obama," ABC News, August 1, 2008, under "Politics," http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2008/08/protesters-what/ (accessed August 20, 2013).

[2] See Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (North Haven: Archon Books, 1978)

[3] Ibid., 100.

[4] Tony Martin, Race First: the Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport: Greendwood Press, 1976), 33.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[6] Golden Age, 28.

[7] Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of Black Nationalism (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 49.

[8] Roderick Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 10.

[9] Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 270.

[10] Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129.

[11] Michael Katz, "Underclass as Metaphor" in The Underclass Debate: Views from History, edited by Michael Katz, 11. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.)

[12] Loic Wacquant, "From Slavery to Mass Incarceration," New Left Review 13 (January/February 2002) http://newleftreview.org/II/13/loic-wacquant-from-slavery-to-mass-incarceration (accessed August 21, 2013).

[13] Ibid.,

[14] See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010)

[15] Rakesh Kochar, Richard Fry, and Paul Taylor, Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics (Center for American Progress, 2011) http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/ (accessed August 20, 2013).

[16] George E. Condon Jr., "Has Obama Done Enough for Black Americans?" nationaljournal.com, May 30, 2013, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/has-obama-done-enough-for-black-americans-20130404 (Accessed August 20, 2013).

[17] Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Towards Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 21.

[18] Sophia Tareen, "Farrakhan Focuses on Economics in Chicago Speech," Associated Press, February 24, 2013. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/farrakhan-focuses-economics-chicago-speech (accessed August 29, 2013).

[19] Thomas Shapiro, Tatjna Meschede, and Sam Osoro, The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide (Institute on Assets and Social Policy, 2013).

[20] PR Newswire, "Million Youth March 15th Anniversary, Yahoo Finance, September 6, 2013 http://finance.yahoo.com/news/million-youth-march-15th-anniversary-152400694.html (accessed September 1, 2013)

[21] Steven Gray, "Can the Black Middle Class Survive," Salon.com, September 3, 2012 http://www.salon.com/2012/09/03/can_the_black_middle_class_survive/ (accessed August 30, 2013)

[22] See Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

[23] ibid.,

[24] C-Span, "The Life and Career of Kwame Ture," April 15, 1998.

[25] Brittney Cooper, "Marches Won't Cut it Anymore: Why This Week's Feels Like a Funeral," Salon.com, August 27, 2013 http://www.salon.com/2013/08/27/marches_wont_cut_it_anymore_why_last_weekend_felt_like_a_funeral/