Tag Archives: white supremacy

Current Events

Zombie Columbus

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Donald Trump’s supporters fished the broken pieces of a destroyed Christopher Columbus statue out of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. They commissioned an artist to repair and reassemble it. And now, “resurrected,” it stands behind the White House barricades, directly in front of the Executive Office Building. It bids defiance, Trump would have us believe, to the “woke mob” who consigned the original to the sea on the Fourth of July in 2020.

            Yet Trump’s Columbus is a Zombie, a golem. He is not exactly dead, but he does not look very good at all. Indeed, Trump’s display is a loser’s defiance, a middle finger in the air flashed at the crowds who booed him off the field as he enters the safety of the stadium tunnel. Nothing courageous or principled about it at all. Trump’s Columbus statue can only survive in his compound, after all, protected by electronic surveillance, steel gates, and the high-powered weaponry of the Secret Service. Thanks to the efforts of generations of Indigenous activists and their allies, a revisionist effort took root late in the 1980s. As a result, nobody with more than half a brain will ever discuss Columbus’s voyages without considering the brutality, avarice, and enslavement that rested at the heart of his “New World” enterprise.

I READ ABOUT TRUMP’S LATEST COLUMBUS FETISH after boarding the Island Packers boat that would carry me back to Ventura from the north shore of Santa Cruz Island, in the Channel Islands National Park. I had spent the day hiking at this beautiful, beautiful place and, resting on the boat, realized I had a signal on my phone for the first time in several blissful hours.

            When I was born, it’s important to remember, the Indian policy of the United States was still known as “termination.” During my lifetime, the United States looked forward to the destruction and dissolution of Indigenous nations, and the assimilation of individual Indigenous peoples into the American body politic. Teachers in Ventura, where I grew up, told us that the Chumash, who inhabited the mainland and the Channel Islands, were extinct. They knew no better. It was likely what they were taught as well. Nobody could tell us where the Chumash had gone, and in grade school I can remember constructing a model of Mission San Buenaventura as part of our social studies curriculum. At the Catholic School I attended, the notion that these two things were connected—disappearance and the missions—was never discussed. Father Junipero Serra, who established the Ventura mission in 1782, was to be revered. It was easy. We never learned anything that would cause us to question the purity of his heart, the fierceness of his commitments, and the piety of his Christianity.

            But the Chumash did not disappear. While home this past week my dad and I drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara, onto what now constitutes the Chumash reservation.  We visited the gorgeous Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center. Signage at Santa Cruz Island, meanwhile, and the presentation by the National Park Service ranger, both featured prominently the island’s original Indigenous inhabitants and the Island’s Chumash name, limuw. Two years ago, once again making my way out to limuw, I shared the boat with a large number of Chumash people traveling to the island to hold ceremonies. And whatever you think of Indigenous casinos, Chumash gaming operations are very profitable. The Chumash are alive and well.

            That is an incredible achievement. If the Spanish, the Mexicans, or murderous Californians had their way, no Chumash would have survived. They defied their colonizers. They refused to disappear.  And in all sorts of ways, they are teaching non-Indigenous southern Californians how they did so. The museum does a fantastic job of this.

DONALD TRUMP IS A LOSER, and all that he represents is a loser’s cause. He and his supporters will never admit their obvious commitment to white supremacy as they try to bring back the past. The best these racists and their sycophants can do is reanimate a broken zombie Columbus and keep it behind the barricades where nobody will ever see it.  They are afraid of a frank debate. Several years ago, Venturans debated what to do about the large Father Serra statue that stood outside City Hall. Some people wanted the statue removed. Others wanted to preserve it.  The debate took place during the pandemic on Zoom.  It lasted several hours. Many people spoke.  I am proud of how my hometown handled this. In the end a compromise was reached: the statue of Father Serra was moved from City Hall to the Mission, just a short distance away. If you want to see it, you know where to go. But Trump, unlike the people in my town, won’t even engage.  He really is a chicken-shit, whiny-ass, little bitch. It continues to amaze me that roughly sixty percent of white people voted for him in each of the last three elections.

The Serra statue, at its former home.

            If in the 1960s, federal authorities still looked forward to the assimilation and disappearance of Native Ameircans, now we see Indigenous peoples laying claim to their stolen homelands. In places, the “Land Back” movement has had small but significant success. Offensive Indigenous mascots have been eliminated; Indigenous place names have been restored. Even Donald Trump, briefly, responded to pressure from Indigenous activists when he became the first American president to address directly the problem of “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” He appointed a commission (“Operation Lady Justice”), and proclaimed the 5th of May “National Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day.” He has abandoned this in his second term and he has tried to undo President Obama’s decision to restore Mt. McKinley’s Indigenous name, Denali, but, again, Trump is a loser, fighting against the forces of time.

            When I was out on limuw I hiked from Scorpion Landing to Smuggler’s Cove and back.  It was listed by the National Park Service as a “strenuous” eight-mile hike. I felt it during the return trip, as the heat increased and there remained a number of mile-long climbs . I looked forward several times and appreciated how much farther I had to go. I also looked behind me, to see how far I had already ascended. We should do something similar when we counter Trump and the old world his followers wish to restore. He wants to pull us back, to drag us down.  He has nothing constructive to offer. Most of us are so far ahead of him. He really is a fat old man, bloated and out of shape, who has been left behind not because of any unfairness but solely because we have judged him by the content of his character. He will stir up the hatred of the racists and the fears of the homophobes and transphobes. He will drag some people down, destroy some careers, and do great damage to the institutions and values we cherish. He will attempt to hurt those of us who climb past him, and push them off the trail. He will scream and yell and pout and posture, as he works to bring back a world in which people like him—white, rich, male and mediocre—were assumed to be the only parties able to hold real power. That belief, perfectly represented by his Columbus golem, can no longer survive in the wild. Talk to young people. Talk to people whose eyes, hearts and minds are open. Trump and Zombie Columbus are so far in their rear-view mirror. These terrible, retrograde, old racists, at the end of the day, are worthy of nothing, least of all your respect. The war is not over. There are many battles ahead. But from the shores of limiw, to the palisades that surround his creepy, caged Columbus, you must know that we are going to win. There is no reason to yield to them an inch.

Current Events

It’s All About White Supremacy

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When FBI Director Kash Patel fired two agents who had kneeled in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement five years before, his actions had the effect of upholding white supremacy. No statement of sympathy for those grieving the murder of young men of color by militarized police forces could be tolerated.  Never mind that the agents kneeled in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died, and where the police officer involved was convicted of murder. Africans Americans are the other, Patel’s actions showed, on whom acts of humanity are wasted. Only some lives matter.

            When Donald Trump refused to continue commemorations of Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Day, a national commitment he pioneered in May of 2020 to end “the disturbing violence against these Americans and to honoring those whose lives have been shattered and lost,” he demonstrated that to him Indigenous lives did not matter, either. Indeed, when Trump tried to stir up white resentment in an affluent Long Island suburb against those who insisted that the local high school change its name, he worked in defense of white supremacy. The grievances of people of color, whether Indigenous or African-American, are illegitimate and worthy of contempt.  You need not take these concerns seriously.  Same thing with the former names of the Cleveland Guardians and Washington Commanders, two teams that have done just fine since they dropped their racist names and imagery.  People of color want you to change what you are doing, Trump suggested, something they have no right to ask you to do.  Only some people’s feelings matter.

            We won’t talk about the past, Trump and his supporters have suggested, unless we do so in a way that instills a “patriotism” that celebrates white supremacy. You do not have to listen to the “Anti-American” complaints of those who have suffered for American empire. Images of slavery will be removed from museums, historic sites, textbooks and classrooms. The Trump Administration has demanded that teachers lie about this country’s past. For Trump and his followers, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. If they can convince you to believe that this country’s past is different than what the documents clearly show, they can claim that what has always been unjust is just, what has always been exploitative is fair, and what has always been explicitly evil is good. On those rare occasions when they concede a shortcoming, they say we have never failed because we have not yet finished trying to fix problems that ought to have been fixed generations ago. The notion that slavery and Indigenous dispossession benefited white immigrants to this settler nation is heresy in eyes of Republicans.

            You can see it in the racist memes sent out by the fascist Department of Homeland Security, overseen by a freak who murders dogs and a meathead who hunts “illegals” while collecting bribes in paper bags. Above George Caleb Bingham’s painting of Daniel Boone leading settlers through the Cumberland Gap—into lands unceded by the Indigenous people who lived upon them—DHS posted on its Instagram page this image:

When white people cross a border and seize property from Indigenous peoples, it is something to celebrate.  That point is made clear when DHS posted John Gast’s “American Progress,” a painting that represents more clearly than any other American work of art the racist ideas and attitudes underlying Manifest Destiny, with the caption “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

To point out that this country took its shape through a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession is to risk one’s life and liberty.  That heritage is filled with racial violence. Republicans, meanwhile, attack affirmative action in colleges, encourage fear of American cities, and attack the integrity and character of people of color. They create a climate of fear, silencing dissent. The Republican Party, a diseased organism entirely in the thrall of its corrupt leader, truly has nothing else. They have no constructive or positive agenda.  The economy is a wreck. The United States has squandered the respect of our friends and allies. And fascism has taken root. They have no significant legislative achievements and, indeed, their weak leader can only govern by the “executive orders” a weak Congress and amoral Supreme Court continue to permit. They have nothing.

There are three factors that can help the Republicans continue to hold power.  One is the continued cowardice and fecklessness of the Democratic leadership which has been unwilling and unable to rise to the occasion. At the same time, Republicans stir up white resentments against the weakest and most marginalized groups in American society: the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants (undocumented or not), and racial and ethnic minorities.  They have nothing, and they know it. They stand for nothing but hatred and white supremacy. So they will also work with determination to rig the electoral system and make it difficult for those who wish to vote. All they can hope for is that they are able to continue to generate hatred and division. And despondency. It worked for Donald Trump spectacularly well in 2024.  It is up to us not only to see that it does not happen again, but that we keep the receipts and hold accountable the Party and its leaders in the future for the things they have said and done. Democrats should loudly and proudly promise that if they take the legislative and executive branches of government, they will expand the Supreme Court and call to account Republican law-breakers.

            Their viciousness is a sign that they sense that they are losing.  I am so fortunate to spend my time talking with young people baffled by the party’s hatred. Like pests, the Republicans will break institutions and hurt people and ruin lives, but their time is limited.  Once young people who could not care less about the culture war issues that haunt the Republicans’ take over, I hope this nightmare will be over.  We can make the Republicans go away. It will take time and enormous effort to rebuild all that they have ruined.  But we need to act.  The sooner the better.  2026 cannot come soon enough.

Current Events

I Want Off The Grid Of The Trajectory of American History

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In the wake of the deadly attack on the Capitol building by a right-wing mob last week, I have found some of the rhetoric used by those who have condemned the attack as troubling as that used by those who provoked and encouraged it in the first place.

I was not surprised by what I witnessed last Wednesday. Many of our leaders, however, seemed absolutely shocked that a large group of violent imbeciles and cosplaying Punishers could assault this “beacon of liberty.”

Does anyone believe this anymore? While the Capitol dome certainly stands as a symbol of American power, that power has been deployed in the name of democracy far less often than many of our leaders seem to believe. The right-wing, racist violence we witnessed on Wednesday is as American as apple pie. Using violence to protect white power and white privilege is one of the things in which American lead the world, along side women’s basketball and incarcerating people of color.

The historian-turned-pundit Jill Lepore said in an interview on WBUR

On Point Presents: A Conversation with Jill Lepore
Time to Go Off The Grid.

that the events in Washington that left her feeling “speechless” were the sorts of things that occurred in other countries, not the United States. It was unfamiliar. “We are,” she said, “off the grid of the trajectory of American history.”

That is a mess of a sentence, but if it means what I think it means, I have to most adamantly disagree. No, Professor Lepore. What we saw on Wednesday was entirely consistent with American history. And from that trajectory and that grid, I swear to God I want off. That the United States is a nation committed to liberty and equality is the biggest lie in American history. Until we face that fact and address it in a meaningful way there is little hope for change.

This country was founded by treasure-seeking storm-troopers who carried with them across the Atlantic guns, avarice, steel and European religious bigotry. They enslaved and subjugated Indigenous peoples. The settlers who followed them came not for freedom but to extract a living from the soil. Whatever wealth they acquired was almost always built

Or Not: Ostriches Bury Their Heads in Sand
Americans Preparing for a Frank Discussion of Their History

upon the backs of millions of enslaved peoples who worked lands stripped away from their Indigenous occupiers at the point of a gun. There are many stories one might tell about Early America. Most of them are filled with exploitation, intolerance, violence, and greed.

It took a Civil War that killed more than 600,000 people to eradicate slavery, but in its aftermath Southerners and their conciliatory enablers rushed to reconstruct institutions that replicated the restrictions on African-Americans that stood before the war. Meanwhile, the armed forces of the United States continued to march against native peoples who refused to surrender their lives, liberties, and property to the United States.

Look around you. The United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, is home to a quarter of its people who live their lives behind bars. When most Americans think about Indigenous peoples at all, they conjure images from the past. Few are willing to consider or are aware of the challenges these communities face today, and fewer still are willing to do anything to help.

On the same day that we learned that a stunning, multicultural coalition had elected the first Jew and the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate, an armed white mob cried foul and stormed the United States Capitol, because they lost what all the evidence shows was a fair and free election. Those who stormed the capitol did not need to fear the inadequate police forces garrisoning the building. They knew, in their lizard brains, that law enforcement in this country too often and in too many ways acts to uphold white supremacy. They feared nothing. For that reason, among others, Wednesday’s violence was so depressing. Not because it was surprising or a new low, but because it was so familiar and so entirely predictable.

History and Historians, Race and Racism, Red Lives Matter

On Charlottesville, and Our National Character

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In what ways does the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville matter?

In the past two weeks I have listened to the Attorney General of the United States announce his determination to investigate discrimination on college campuses against…..wait for it….white people.  This move was endorsed by a President who has called Mexicans “rapists” and “animals,” and who has in as many words endorsed police brutality against African Americans and other people of color.  A sheriff’s deputy in Oklahoma, meanwhile, who gunned down an African American man who was walking away from her with his hands raised was rehired by another law enforcement agency.  And Friday night, and again on Saturday in Charlottesville, white supremacists marched in an American city, on an American college campus founded by Thomas Jefferson.  That flawed hypocrite whose moral cowardice was so great, who fathered children with his slave mistress while owning many other African Americans, who denounced native peoples as savages and spent much of his presidency trying to dispossess them, proclaimed his support for the premise that “all men are created equal.”

Saturday morning I sold a broken down flat-screen TV to a scrap-dealer.  Found a dude on Craig’s List who bought and sold dead flat-screens, and who included in his rapid-fire text messages a reference to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.  He showed up. Never shook my hand. Never made eye-contact, and never acknowledged my wife who also was standing outside.  He had on an Infowars T-Shirt.  “Ideas are bulletproof,” it read, with the letters imposed over an image of the Constitution. And the stickers on the back window of his truck?  A gun, pointed right at me, with the caption “Not This Truck;”  a  “F–k Cuomo” sticker, with the “f” and the “k” fashioned from the outlines of assault rifles; and a seal for some sort of militia group to which he pledged allegiance (I wish I could remember exactly what it said).

I sold a broken down television, in other words, to a guy who loudly proclaimed his embrace of Christianity in every text he sent, while at the same time announcing to all whose path he crossed that he not only would use violence to protect his personal property, but that he expected somebody to try to take it.  What a dark, frightened, and violent way to look at the world.

These views, expressed on my driveway by a frightened but well-armed scrap-dealer/militia member, or acted upon by the vicious nerds, gun fetishists, racists and thugs in Charlottesville, and described as moral equivalents to the views held by those who believe in justice, equality, and that black lives do matter by our babbling President, are of course nothing new in American history.  We have seen this before.  Too many times over too many years.  Nearly all of us who study this nation’s history for a living, I suspect, were shocked, angered and dismayed, but we were not surprised.  Sick and tired, but not surprised. The racists and white supremacists appeared in Charlottesville, but they had never, every, really gone away.

And that is a lesson, I believe, that must now inform my courses in Native American History even more than they have done in the past.  Hatred and fear of a racialized other.  It runs through the colonial period of American history. You cannot miss it if you look at the sources: from the treatment of native peoples by a frontier population intent on extracting a livelihood from ground seized from native peoples, to the slave owners, and the the lawmakers and legislators and founding fathers who regulated and policed the expropriation of native peoples’ lands and African peoples’ labor.   As I make my way slowly through Robert Parkinson’s magisterial The Common Cause, the best book I have seen on the American Revolution in some time, it is abundantly clear how important a fostered hatred of warlike native peoples and rebellious African slaves was to give shape to the “common cause” for which American patriots fought during the Revolutionary war.  Racism was there at the outset, fundamental to the formation of American national identity.  There have been, of course, many courageous people who have spoken out against this blight at the heart of the nation–some of them were mowed own by a white supremacist’s car on Saturday–and this heroic tradition is important.  But to deny the centrality of its opposite–racial antipathy–is to fail to examine closely the entire content of our nation’s character.

Three times more Africans migrated to the English American colonies than white people between 1630 and 1780.  Slavery was fundamental to the settlement and growth of the Anglo-American empire.  That dynamic and expansive process of enslavement, as historians like Brett Rushforth, Alan Gallay, Linford Fisher, Christina Snyder and many others have recently shown, ensnared many native peoples, too.  Slavery was central.  So was the systematic and organized dispossession of native peoples. I have tried to write about all of this in the second edition of Native America.

“This was all in the past,” you might say.  That is what Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to think.  The President, too, ever-ready with insult and slur, has proven himself time and again incapable of denouncing the white supremacists who believe strongly that he endorses their views.  This all is heartbreaking, you might say.  You might say that what we are seeing in Charlottesville is inconsistent with who we are as a nation.  You may respond to the news  by tweeting out a message of hope or inspiration under the hashtag #thisisnotus.  That is naive.  Dispossession. Discrimination.  Police forces, armed and militarized to the hilt, locked and loaded to protect the lives, liberties, and property of white people from what  they perceive as the threat posed by people of color, slay African Americans and Native Americans largely without fear of the consequences.

I have seen an increasing number of “Police Lives Matter” flags in the Rochester area, and “Blue Line” American flags.  I see on the news stories about how a Canandaigua woman quickly sold out of the shirts and signs she printed proclaiming that “I Support the Police,” or something like that. It’s a tough job. I get that. If you cannot do it without fearing or discriminating or murdering people of color, please for the sake of humanity do something else.

Is it worse than it has been in the past? We have talked about this as a family. We live in a small suburb of Rochester, a faculty ghetto of sorts where most residents like to think of themselves as tolerant and open to diversity.  My wife, whose skin is dark, is pulled over frequently by our local police; in nineteen years living here, I have never been pulled over.  It has been bad in the past.  There is no denying that.  But it is bad now, and it is getting worse even in the short time since the last election.  For too many white Americans, black lives do not matter.   Native lives, for too many of them, matter not at all. Too many white people view programs like affirmative action, intended to address past systematic injustices, as a threat.  And the people who hold these views? They know the president has their back.

I would like to think that we historians can make a difference, however small, by discussing this history in our classes. I do not see how one can understand American history in its complexity without doing so.  Few people read our work, I know.  But if we are to be effective educators, we must reach out.  We must have faith in the power of knowledge and reason and dialogue and debate.  We must write and teach with the urgency that comes from knowing that our words matter.  And in African-American History, or Native American history, we have the opportunity to explore the structural inequalities and profound injustices that have always rested at the core of this nation’s story.  We must be straight with our students.  Most of my colleagues are already doing this, but the urgency for doing this is growing. Cast away the comforting myths.  It is not our job to instill love of country, patriotism or civics.  We must counter this argument every chance we get. Leave that to the hacks and the partisans, the liars and the myth-makers and the members of the PTA.  We must defend what we do. We must be honest.  Look the evil in the eye.  Expose it to the light of day.  Name the evil, and show our students where it has manifested itself in the past, and the many forms it can take, the contortions and distortions it demands and justifies.  We will take some heat in doing this.  The dingbats and the right-wingers and some of the most conservative evangelicals and others will say that we are not doing our jobs, that we must stick to the facts.   And we cannot take these foolish charges sitting down. We must challenge those who denounce what we are doing with the meaningless and stupid epithet, “politically correct.” Debate these people.  Call them out, politely, professionally, but persistently. Only by standing tall can we help to inspire in our students the courage to speak out, to ask tough questions, and demand reasoned and relevant answers.  Only by doing so can we, in some small way, encourage them to confront and to resist the rottenness that has plagued this nation for far too long.