The Stone
is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both
timely and timeless.
1.
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?
2.
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 19th
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.
3.
Yancy:
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?
4.
Chomsky:
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.
5.
Yancy:
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?
6.
Chomsky:
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.”
Photo
Samoset visiting Pilgrim
colonists at Plymouth, 1620s. Credit North Wind Picture Archives, via
Associated Press
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.
7.
Yancy: 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?
8.
Chomsky:
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, [WoodyAllen. ElmoreLeonard.
Soderbergh. Clooney. BradPitt.] 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.
9.
Yancy: 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?
10.
Chomsky:
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.
[ClintEastwood.] 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.
11.
Yancy:
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?
12.
Chomsky:
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.
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