It was all a joke, they said. You saw the video. The people were laughing. They thought it was funny. Geez. Where’s your sense of humor? Nothing was meant by it.
The “it,” of course, was the scene from the President’s latest “rally” in Florida. While riffing on the refugee crisis, the President wondered aloud what might be done about the problem of refugees crossing the border. One Florida Man audience member shouted, “Shoot them!”
The white people standing behind the President laughed out loud, shouted their approval, applauded, and hooted and hollered. The President, who has demonstrated his racism repeatedly, did not discourage this. No. He joined in. It’s genocide humor, and it has a long history. Students of Native American history ought to recognize that immediately.
Sometimes it is useful for historians to consider who is laughing at whom. Whose cultural values can be mocked, scorned, and caricatured?
At the outset of the encounter between natives and newcomers, Indians sometimes laughed at the Europeans they were coming to know. Their appearance, their customs, their cluelessness about survival in a new land: all caused Indians, on occasion, to laugh at them. But that soon changed. A Powhatan priest, for instance, late in the seventeenth century approached the overseer on William Byrd’s Virginia plantation. The priest offered to make rain in exchange for two bottles of rum. The priest began to work, and soon the rain fell. Byrd refused to pay the priest. Byrd, who was only joking, told the priest that “hew as a Cheat, and had seen the cloud a coming.” Only after teasing the priest some more did Byrd provide him with the rum. When another Powhatan healer worked to charm a rattlesnake that the planter William Claiborne had captured, Claiborne hit the snake with his cane, causing it to bite the healer. He recovered from the venomous bite, but to Claiborne it was all a joke. He and his associates got a good laugh out of it. Only joking.
Who is laughing at whom? The process continued. Americans in the 1830s described the Mexicans and Pueblos who inhabited New Mexico as backwards and barbaric, as people “peculiarly blessed with ugliness,” and a “lazy and gossiping people” who lived “in darkness and ignorance.” This racist rhetoric provided, of course, a justification for empire, as American imperialists occupied their land. They would uplift the savages as they took their land. John Watts, a delegate from New Mexico in the 1860s told Congress that it should ban the liquor trade in the territory. If alcohol poisoning, however, was an “easy and a pleasant way to die,” he suggested that Congress might permit “the poor Indian, for whom our sympathies run out in uninterrupted stream, to enjoy the privilege of dying in that glorious manner?” According to the record, laughter followed Watts’ joke, genocide humor on Capitol Hill.
When the suffering of a particular group, today as in history, becomes the subject of a dominant group’s humor, that says much about the morality, compassion, and wisdom of that dominant group. Talk of shooting immigrants will accompany the actual shooting of immigrants. Indeed, less than a month ago federal authorities arrested a self-constituted militia leader who held refugees at gunpoint on the southern border. Talk of native peoples’ inhumanity always preceded violent acts of inhumanity by the dominant group. It preceded George Percy’s expedition against the Paspaheghs early in the seventeenth century when the English soldiers amused themselves by “shooting out the brains” of the Native American children they had taken captive. It preceded the “trophy taking” that took place after the Sand Creek Massacre, when Colorado militia forces castrated the bodies of the men they gunned down, and it preceded the standing ovation opera-goers gave in Denver when scalps taken by these cavalrymen were displayed at intermission. It preceded the “many bad deeds” white people did to the Crows after they settled on their Montana Reservation. White Ranchers, the Crow woman Pretty Shield said, “gunned down Crow horse, she recalled bitterly, as though they “were wolves that killed the white man’s sheep.” She recalled the time when “white cowboys mead a deaf and dumb Crow boy on the plains, and because he could not answer their questions, could not even hear what they said, they roped him and dragged him to his death.” James Byrd, the African-American man dragged to his death in 1998 in Jasper Texas: his death, too, took place at the hands of men deeply committed to their racist values, including their racist jokes.
The President is stirring up a noxious brew of lethal ingredients. The dangerous humors unleashed are toxic, and will have horrible consequences. He was only joking, you might say. Loosen up. It was meant to be funny. But we all know that racist activity is on the increase, that those who hold these views have been emboldened. The white people in the photograph at the top of this post–they are smiling, too, at a lynching. The brutal rhetoric that preceded this sort of violence is becoming more common. It is encoded, but it is there. And it is happening more openly and more often. Those who laugh at the notion of racist violence, at genocide humor, will be judged harshly by historians. They might be “very fine people” individually, but theirs is a moral failing, and it is racist. We who study the past have seen this before. Too often, dehumanization leads to violence. Dehumanization is the precondition to violence.
This is rich. Six Republicans have co-sponsored the bi-partisan bill.
INDIANZ.COM offered a useful summary of the legislation:
The bill was introduced to resolve questions about the tribe’s ability to restore homelands through the land-into-trust process. Congress enacted a similar law in 2014 and did the same in 2018 to clear up doubts that have arisen as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carcieri v. Salazar.
According to the ruling, a tribe can only go through the land-into-trust process if it was “under federal jurisdiction” in 1934. The Mashpee didn’t gain recognition of their status until 2007, well after the cut-off date
But the Bureau of Indian Affairs, during the Obama administration, concluded that Carcieri wasn’t a hindrance to the tribe because its citizens were living on a reservation in 1934. The Trump administration has since reversed course in response to litigation filed by opponents of a planned casino in the city of Taunton, only about 20 miles from an existing casino across the border in Rhode Island. The reservation, however, remains in trust at this point. The BIA has confirmed that it lacks a mechanism to take a tribe’s land out of trust, something that hasn’t happened since the disastrous termination era. The Trump administration had proposed regulations that would have provided such a mechanism. Due to tribal opposition, the newly confirmed head of the Department of the Interior has said the BIA won’t move forward with the changes.
Why on earth would the President claim that this legislation is unfair, and does not treat Indians equally? Because, conceivably, the Mashpee Wampanoags could engage in gaming, should they follow the processes spelled out the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
Too many people view gaming as an unfair privilege possessed by Native American peoples. They view gaming as one of a number of “special rights” Indians possess that other Americans do not. Trump either wants those who read his tweet to think that Senator Warren is pushing legislation that discriminates against native peoples, or he is lamenting that native peoples have unfair advantages that allow them to compete all-too-successfully with his seedy gaming enterprises. Nobody familiar with Trump’s history will be surprised to learn that the latter option is what fueled his angry tweet.
Native American tribes have something called inherent sovereignty. It is a concept that is described at length in Native America. Because native peoples belong to polities that predated the creation of the United States, under the American constituitonalism they have some of the attributes of sovereign nations. Essentially, Native American tribes can do whatever they want as governments unless they have explicitly lost that right as the result of a treaty or an act of Congress, or because the power in question is somehow inconsistent with their status as “domestic dependent nations.” Gaming, the Supreme Court held in the late 1980s, was a right that native communities retained under their inherent sovereignty, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which soon followed, limited the tribe’s ability to exercise that right.
The Mashpee Wampanoags want this bill, and their supporters across Indian country agree. You can read the statement tribal chairman Cedric Cromwell here. Donald Trump has trampled upon so many constitutional norms. Let’s call him out for each and every lie.
I am going to go see Hamilton this weekend, and I have been
invited to share my impressions of the award-winning musical on a local
NPR-affiliate the week following. I will
be teaching the American Revolution next semester, and as some of my
posts over the past several months make clear, I have been thinking about
the stories we should tell quite a bit.
I have also been thinking a lot
about the American constitutional system that emerged from that Revolution,
what the Founders intended, and what they might think about our current
mess. I have never thought much of “Framer’s
Intent” as a style of constitutional argument that carries much weight, but
still, we are historians, and comparisons for us come easily.
We have a president elected by a
minority of the voters whose administration shows levels of mendacity, greed,
and spite that stand in stark contrast to that of his predecessor. The president’s supporters work to restrict
the right to vote of poor people and peoples of color out of fear that these
constituencies will vote against him.
Some of his sycophants, led by the besotted Jerry Falwell, Jr., have
suggested that the president unconstitutionally extend his term. Indeed,
the Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi expressed
her belief that the President will not voluntarily leave office if he loses
the election. Meanwhile, the Attorney-General
of the United States and the Secretary
of the Treasury defy subpoenas from the House of Representatives, that
chamber of the legislature that most directly represents the American people.
THE REVOLUTIONARY
GENERATION believed that republican forms of government were inherently fragile
because they relied upon the wisdom and the civic-mindedness of “the people.” The revolutionary generation, as historians
like Bernard Bailyn, H. Trevor Colbourn, and Gordon Wood showed long ago, had
no reason to expect that a republic could last forever and, indeed, all the
examples they could point to had descended into tyranny and corruption. Perhaps our time is running out, I sometimes
think. Perhaps we have had a good run that
now is ending. I legitimately worry that
the American constitutional system will not survive my children’s generation in
any meaningful or recognizable form. The
system is broken, as so many politicians have pointed out. It is broken because cynical, cowardly, and
corrupt Republicans, aided by timorous Democrats, smashed it to pieces.
The Revolutionary generation
believed that the purpose of government was to secure the Commonwealth, the good of the whole. In order to pursue the good of the whole,
citizens must exercise and practice virtue. A virtuous citizen, in the parlance of the
time, was one who could set aside his or her narrow self-interest and willingly
make sacrifices for the good of the whole.
Corruption, in this sense, was the exact opposite of virtue. In order to
practice virtue, citizens required independence.
They could not be subject to the will of another. That is part of the reason
why women (subject to the authority of their fathers and husbands), tenants
(subject to their landlord’s authority) and wage-earners (subject to their
employers) could not vote in elections.
In addition to independence, citizens had to remain active. They had to practice citizenship. They had to
inform themselves, remain vigilant, because liberty was a fragile thing. A supine and ill-informed citizenry made
fit-tools for tyrants.
While agreeing broadly that these
concepts were important, the revolutionary generation could disagree intensely
over what these terms meant. But few questioned the importance of these values.
Commonwealth, Virtue, Independence, and
Citizenship: by these standards we
are not doing very well.
The Trump Administration has
revealed itself as a smash-and-grab operation operated by liars and
grifters. The Republican Party has
become a haven for hacks and fools, an unholy alliance of the super-rich and
the ill-informed. The President who proudly
proclaimed his love for the “poorly-educated” on the campaign trail treats
government as little more than an opportunity to generate wealth for his family
and bile against those he views as enemies. He lies ferociously. He casts his legitimate
critics as “enemies
of the people.” He calls names. He
vilifies. For him there is no common
good. He is incurious and unlettered, a
brute and a tyrant. He knows nothing of the Revolution or the Constitution.
Of course, there are Republicans who
believe that we are part of something larger than a political party. There are patriotic Republicans who disagree
intensely with Trump’s policies and behavior. But none of the Republicans
holding office have had the courage to oppose him in any meaningful manner.
Instead, they furrow their brows, hold their noses, and dive headfirst into the
cesspool, the smell of the crap no longer bothering them once they are in.
Tens of millions of people continue
to support the President, seemingly unaware of his administration’s utter
contempt for the Constitution. Some of them embrace the President’s politics of
spite. They find room under his big, hateful tent to express their own fears,
and a racism nourished by the fevered rants of the megalomaniac who stumbled
into the White House. Perhaps his fervent supporters know so little about the
Constitution, and their civic illiteracy is so great, that they do not
understand the dangers this president and his party portend. The citizen who does not know what the
Constitution says is poorly-equipped to know when its provisions are stripped
away.
AS A STUDENT OF
THE REVOLUTION, I fear for the future.
The founding generation knew that republics did not last for log and
that corruption, selfishness, and ignorance posed fundamental threats. Many of their most momentous debates centered
on questions of how to avoid these threats. As he watched the government
struggle during the Confederation period, Alexander Hamilton expressed his
distrust of the people. They could not
govern responsibly. “All men of respectability
who have been witnesses of the despotism and iniquity of the legislature, are
convinced that the principal people in the community must for their own
defense, unite to overset the party I have alluded to.” High stakes were
involved, he felt. “The safety of all
those who have something to lose,” he wrote, “calls upon them to take care that
the power of the government is intrusted to proper hands.” He called for a much more powerful central
government than was established by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. When he
became George Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, he argued for policies of
broad political significance.
Admittedly, it has been a long time
since I read in any depth in Hamilton’s work.
I am not as up-to-date on the literature of the 1780s and 1790s as I
want to be. Still, it seems to me that Hamilton’s
experience during the war had convinced him of the necessity for a vigorous
government. He did not believe that He
did not believe that one could rely on “Virtue” as the basis for a framework of
government. He believed, in fact, that mankind was in general so selfish and
ambitious that virtue alone could never provide the basis for a system of
government. A government based on virtue
assumed that people would think of the common good. Hamilton
thought all of that was nonsense.
Government should appeal, he argued, to
the well-born, the wealthy, and the able if it were to succeed. He considered these people a sort of natural
aristocracy. Hamilton admired Great
Britain and especially its commercial power.
He wanted the same for America. He thought that this could be obtained most
easily by pursuing two general policies:
First, Hamilton wanted to use the power of the federal government to
encourage manufacturing and commerce in order to make the United States
economically strong and independent for Europe.
He did not believe the United States could remain politically
independent of Europe if it remained economically dependent. It must move beyond a colonial economy.
Second, he wanted to link the rich and the wealthy to the government. These were the secure part of the body politic,
he believed, the stable people most capable of taking the long-term view of the
issues. These were the stable
people.
How
to achieve this? Hamilton laid out his
program in his Report on the Public Credit, a white paper arguing that the
government could take steps to strengthen the nation’s finances. His program consisted of two things: Funding
and assumption, and the creation of a National Bank. Hamilton asserted that the
government needed two things in order to prosper: revenue and Credit. It needed capital, money, but it also needed
the faith of merchants and other governments that it would repay its
debts. Without that faith, the
government would lack the ability to borrow money, which sometimes governments
have occasion to do.
All told, the Confederation had
accumulated a debt of $52 million dollars.
Hamilton said that this debt should be paid in full, or funded.
Also, the several states had accumulated debts of $25 million. He believed that the federal government
should assume responsibility for
these debts and pay them in full. How would
this work? For funding, Hamilton
asserted that all those holding certificates of the confederation debt, these
bonds, would be paid the full face value for those notes. The money for funding
this debt would come from the issuance of new notes.
Holders of the
debt would be paid in full, unless they preferred to receive the newly issued
notes. These notes would serve as a form
of currency, so long as confidence existed that the government would continue
to survive. For the assumption of state
debts, the same principal applied. The United States would pay to the holders
of state paper the face value or, if they chose, to deliver to them new bonds.
What
was Hamilton after?
He claimed that the failure of certain
states to honor their obligations undermined American credit in overseas
markets. He saw the assumption of state debts as a means for the federal government
to secure the gratitude and loyalty of state creditors by honoring their claims
before the states could manage to pay them.
These creditors would look to the new national government, rather than
the state governments, securing the allegiance of an important class of
citizens.
Hamilton also wanted to establish a
national bank. Banks, he argued, could
create capital. A national banking institution was an unprecedented idea. Hamilton
recognized that a large financial institution could act as the fiscal agent of
the United States
government.
This bank would be
a joint public-private venture. 4/5 of
the stock of the national bank would be held by private investors. The bank, he argued, was a public
institution, thus the stock ought to be available to the public.
There
were many critics of the Bank. There
was, many of these critics contended, nothing in the Constitution that
authorized the United States government to establish a national banking
institution. The Bank took the notion of
implied powers too far.
Congress deadlocked over Hamilton’s financial program. Many southern states, especially Virginia, were unhappy about assumption, because they had already paid their debts and did not relish the prospect of possibly being taxed to assist heavily indebted states like Massachusetts.
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson met with Hamilton. They reportedly worked out a compromise over dinner. They agreed to support his financial program if, after ten years, Hamilton agreed to support the notion of establishing the permanent seat of the national capitol in the south. .Funding and assumption passed the Congress, the Bank of the United States was granted a 20-year charter, and the national capital was built in the District of Columbia.
PERHAPS HAMILTON
INJECTED A POWERFUL STRAIN OF CYNICISM into the American political system. His distrust in the capacity of ordinary
people to rule responsibly is powerful and he stated it frequently. I have not read a lot on Hamilton recently,
but the thing that strikes me as I reflect on this period we have entered is
that he did expect those chosen to lead in the republic’s extended sphere to be
wise, and men of character and integrity. It seems like we the people have
chosen poorly lately, and part of that is our fault. And if the President is reelected, whether by
fair means or foul, I am not sure the system can be saved. Soon, we
are told, 50% of the American people will live in 8 states. Half the
population will have 16 senators, and half will have sixty-four. Show me a political leader with vision calling
for reform of these deep structural problems, and I will show you a woman or a
man marginalized in our political life, denounced as a dreamer, a demagogue, or
a “socialist.”
MY DAUGHTER IS
FINISHING HER first year of college. At her high school graduation ceremony
eleven months ago, the Superintendent opened his remarks to the graduates with
an apology. I am sorry, he said, on
behalf of my generation, for leaving your generation with so many problems to
solve. We failed you. But looking out at
that auditorium filled with kids, he expressed some optimism, too. Your generation is better than ours is so
many ways. Save us, he said. You can do
it.
I found this profoundly moving. We need to help these young people. We need
to encourage them to be braver than us. These
young people, after all, now live in a world that you and I have helped to
create for them where too many people confuse their feelings and their fears
for facts, where being smart and engaged and critical and willing to ask
questions can make one an object of scorn.
They live in a world as well where complexity is so often dismissed,
where big and difficult answers to the big questions are avoided, that asking
these sorts of questions can take a certain amount of courage. Rational, reasoned, and just public policy is
difficult if not impossible without an informed, engaged, and rationally-thinking
public willing to ask tough questions, to engage.
Here is what a student of mine wrote
a couple of years ago for her Humanities final.
The assignment I gave asked students to write about human nature,
justice, and the problem of evil, as they contemplated an article by Roger
Rosenblatt I have mentioned many times on this blog, and works by Sophocles,
Plato, Thucydides, Augustine, More, the Bible, and Shakespeare. “The question remains,” this very talented
student wrote, “how do we account for all of the hatred, violence, and
injustice that we witness? What words do we use to describe it? How can we
possibly rationalize it and make sense of it? Where do we find its opposite in
the world, and how do we eagerly point at that, so as to say, ‘See, this is
also us. This is also me.’
“In a world and a human history overwhelmed
by hatred, violence, and injustice, what counters it, I argue, is love,
compassion, faith, and the courage to rise above it.”
I
agree with the superintendent. This rising generation is already better than us
in important ways—its open-mindedness, its tolerance, its acceptance of
difference. I really believe that. As educators we must encourage courage. We
have a lot of influence. Or at least we
have the potential to be highly influential:
a cruel or an uncaring word from us, for example, even when cast off
thoughtlessly or uncritically, or because we are stressed out or too busy, can
do so much damage, while a simple kind word, a single note of encouragement,
can do something that these students might remember for the rest of their lives,
something that can help them write a beautiful life story.
So let’s do better. Let’s encourage fearlessness, even where we
have failed to demonstrate it ourselves.
Each and every day, I have the opportunity, if I choose to truly be
present, to truly listen, to be awed by their achievements, humbled by the
obstacles they have overcome to get to this college, inspired by their creative
thinking, pushed by their challenging questions, and amazed by the alacrity
with which so many of them seek out injustice, attempt to correct oppression,
and in thousands of small ways show the vital courage to make the world—our
world—a better place. Our future is in
their hands.
For years you have held a lacrosse tournament the first weekend in May. You call it “Cinco de Laxo,” an obvious play on that made-up American holiday that takes place every May 5th.
To promote this tournament, like most lacrosse tournament organizers and promoters, you produce posters and t-shirts. Nothing surprising in this at all. But in your promotional efforts, you utilize racist caricatures of Mexicans, images as deeply offensive as the Cleveland Indians’ “Chief Wahoo” logo, and the Blackface imagery that still crops up too often (even at my college, unfortunately).
I have been complaining about this for quite some time. My kids have never played in this tournament. They never will, even though they play lacrosse. I wrote to the members of the Penfield School Board. Penfield Lacrosse uses school property for its events, and links to the high school program on its website. I wrote to the superintendent of Penfield Schools. I wrote to every member of the board on Penfield Lacrosse. Not one of you bothered to respond.
I have heard from parents in Penfield who see these images as perfectly acceptable.
They are not. At a time when our presiding tyrant routinely demonizes refugees from Central America, denounces Mexicans as “murderers and rapists,” gins up fears of crimes and drugs crossing the border, and in general stokes the fires of racism and white supremacy by coddling the Klansmen of Charlottesville, the last thing we need is a youth lacrosse league peddling in such damaging images.
Because when you reduce a group of people to a caricature based on some of the worst sterotypes about them, when you appropriate images from the past to falsely and inaccurately define people who are still here today, you in effect trivialize their claims to justice, and aid and abet the racists and vigilantes and the border troglodytes who terrorize refugees while playing army along the southern border. When, through your promotional materials, you deploy images that bestialize an entire group of people, you provide cover for those who feel that these people are “illegal,” or “dangerous,” or an invading force, or that odious policies like family separation are entirely justified.
One parent wrote to me and said that I should suggest an alternative image that Penfield Lacrosse could use. Maybe there is an image of Mexicans you could use to make this more palatable.
There is not. You need to stop. Call your tournament, the Spring Fest, or the May Day Parade, or something other than this. These images are racist and demeaning, they are hurtful and harmful, and they do nothing to make people of color feel welcome in the town of Penfield.
A Discussion Forum for Teaching and Writing Native American History
