The Repetition of History
After watching Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke I felt sorry for myself and murderously angry with the country that seems to never miss an opportunity to remind me that it hates me. “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”? Would that it were only George Bush. It’s not just one man or one President (you read that correctly, George Bush is not a man). The whole system doesn’t care about black people. The NFL doesn’t even really care about black people, which is particularly sad since the black people who play the game and buy the merchandise can’t ever own the teams. Bald displays of racism generally make me sad or angry, but for some reason Lee’s documentary made me feel hopeless. What is the point? We can’t fight wind, water, the police, the politicians, and the insurance industry all at the same time. We can’t win, they (“them” / “the Man” / whomever) won’t let us win--not now, not ever. There is no resolution to the racial problems in this country. It’s always going to be white people crapping all over colored people and at best it’s only going to get incrementally better for a few lucky souls.
A chilling thought occurred to me days later: Can it get worse? I’m one of those people that tends to think that the best predictor of the future is history (as opposed to hermits who have things revealed to them, pixies, Gods, or whatever the South is into these days). So as I was trying to organize a working theory about what might happen to African-Americans going forward, my mind naturally turned to other historically oppressed peoples who were taken from their homes, enslaved, forced to make a life in other people’s countries who didn’t want them, peoples who have generally been messed with at all possible points in history--you know, the Jews.
Now, I have long held the belief that Jewish people and African-Americans were the most natural alignment of minorities in this country. Poor leadership by both groups has obscured that reality, but let us not forget that those brave “Freedom Riders,” a flashpoint of the early Civil Rights movement, were funded with a lot of Jewish money and included many Jewish students putting their lives on the line alongside their black brothers.
Many political types keep trying to make alliances out of blacks and Hispanics, or blacks and Asians--they just assume that African-Americans and Africans have the same set of issues and concerns. Not true. Mexicans, Jamaicans, Koreans, Nigerians these are all immigrant populations. Puerto Ricans in New York are what the Irish were in New York 100 years ago. Now immigrants are mistreated universally now as it ever was. But when you are an immigrant you’ve got a couple of things going for you. First of all you have a cultural and often personal memory of a time and a place where people who look like you and talk like you ran things, made money, and were treated with respect. You remember that even if you are treated like trash here in America, you are not trash. In fact there is a whole other country where your ethnic group survives and in some cases thrives. You come to America with a hope and a dream of a better life for you and your offspring. Even after you’ve been here for generations, you still have that historical legacy of coming from a place where your people run the show. If you are Irish your family could have been here for a hundred years, yet you can still go to Ireland in 2006 and find some cousin or person that is related to you. You can go find a tree that your great grandfather planted or a liquor store that he robbed or whatever it is people do when they go back to their family’s homeland.
Well most African-Americans aren’t immigrants by any definition of the word. When the Dutch came to swindle Manhattan Island off the natives there were 31 of them: 20 white settlers and 11 black slaves. Those kind of proportions will bear out in any northern early settlement. In the south they brought even more blacks with them. Every time a new batch of colonists arrived they either came with or quickly purchased a contingent of slave labor. Hey, somebody had to work the land while the white people were busy stealing things from the Native Americans. Europeans may have discovered the New World (and by “discovered” I of course mean “stole”) but a black guy rowed the boat. African-Americans were here from the jump, and just like any waspy pan-white person you can think of, America is the only place an African-American can legitimately call home.
Africa? Please? Any black person whose has been to Africa (and every African-American should try to go at least once) knows that they don’t belong there from the moment they step off the plane. We’ve got no “peoples” there, nobody’s ever heard of our surname before. We can’t look forward to the thrill of seeing a spot that our grandmothers used to tell us about when we were young. It’s not just that we don’t speak the local or rural language – we didn’t even know it existed three hours ago. Nothing is familiar--not personally, not culturally, not historically. And that is not even getting into the fact that picking a random country on the African continent likely has no relationship whatsoever to the geographic territory that our ancestors may have been kidnapped from. It’s like telling an Italian-American to go to Poland to look for his family heritage.
Or maybe it’s like telling a Polish Jew to go back to Palestine. I mean, I guess so, from a religious point of view, but ethnically, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I imagine that an African-American feels in Africa somewhat like a reformed New York Jew feels in Israel. It’s nice and all, but I bet South African fried chicken doesn’t taste a whole lot better than Israeli bagels and lox.
Hence, I see a connection between these peoples, the African-American and the Jewish American. Of course our current experiences in America are quite different. Jewish people have attained a level of cultural wealth and power that blacks have not (and this is why the Man likes to pit us against one and other while our leaders continue to be too stupid to realize the game). Tel-Aviv is no New York City, but at least it’s something. And while I think it’s very important not to downplay the level of anti-semiticism in this country that is never more than a Mel Gibson movie away, it is not now the same kind of violent racism and prejudice we see in our prisons and police. I can’t say who’s got it better or worse because being black is the only “other” I have been, but we can all recognize that it is different.
That difference however is only accentuated if we look just to our recent patch of historical experiences. One must remember that Jewish people have been enslaved and oppressed since Before 1. 1 was so long ago that African-Americans as a distinct ethnic group didn’t even exist back then. The annals of Jewish history are colored with many modern day African-American problems.
European Jews of the Renaissance and Pre-Industrial era had an experience very much like the black experience in America. Looking backwards we can see a marginalized race, one that belonged nowhere even though they were as European as anybody else. They lived in ghettos, and I don’t mean they lived in some dilapidated part of town that we would now call a ghetto if we saw it today. I mean that the term “ghetto” was coined to describe “a place where Jewish people live.” It was a slur then, and I guess still is today. People seem to think that it was easy enough for Jews to “pass” or pretend to be white just like everybody else, but by the 17th century pretty much all across Europe Jewish people had to carry special identification badges and wear special clothes and even silly hats. Blacks don’t have to wear special clothes and silly hats (although … well, whatever) but we do have to “stay black and die” which is obvious enough. Blacks today are often analogized to some kind of beast, be it gorilla or “lone wolf.” The fear seems to be sexual. Jews of that era were always being called rats or roaches, some kind of disease spreading vermin. Whether you’re a monkey or a mouse, you’re not enjoying a whole lot of positive reinforcement or getting good press. Take away some bling and I bet 18th century Poland is nearly indistinguishable from modern Atlanta. You’ve got a population of Jews in cities in Poland that dwarfs gentiles, it is a center for Jewish culture and education, yet they are surrounded by some of their most anti-Jewish enemies around. Meanwhile Atlanta boasts a huge and culturally significant number of African-Americans, but they are surrounded by the rest of Georgia. If you gave any black person a choice between moving to rural Georgia and Iraq, they might well think twice before purchasing an Iraqi cell phone number.
It is not a perfect analogy. I don’t believe that European Jews had the kind of systemic drug problems and attendant familial disintegration that accompanies some of our worse off urban areas. Modern African-Americans don’t have powerful and asinine Popes on their ass every ten seconds. But the way the average man on the street treats the average “other” man on the street was probably very similar. Certainly from the macro-society level perspective, the marginalization and political disenfranchisement was similar. The way the prejudices of the time infected every aspect of life was similar. I bet many a 17th century Jew would pick up the paper and read something about how his people were being treated and become hopeless and ask himself: “What is the point?”
Now for the scary part. If we look at the 17th century European Jew as a fair historical approximation for the 21st century African-American we know that things were about to get better, significantly so, for a lot of them. We know that the aristocracy was dying and a middle class was forming. A middle class that Jewish people were going to be able to be a part of. Capitalism dictates that wealth and not birth is the key to respect and the industrial revolution was about to create opportunities for some Jews to get wealthy and thereby gain some respect. We know that England was about to remove legal restrictions on Jewish life like no country ever had, and we of course know that America was about to become a real and viable opportunity for Jews looking to practice their religion freely and make a ton of money. America was going to give Jews as fair a chance (not to be confused with “fair”) as they had gotten for a millennia. We know all of this.
We also know that after all that had started to happen, after the Category Eon hurricane looked like it was finally starting to break, Europe was about to turn horrifyingly violent towards them. We know that it would soon get so much worse than silly hats and no property rights. Look, it is easy to blame the Holocaust on just Hitler or just the Germans. But any fair examination of history reveals that all Hitler did was tap into a burning hatred for these people that had been harbored for centuries. All the Germans did was to be the first European power to realize that they weren’t all that powerful anymore and look for a scapegoat. Could America have stopped the Holocaust? Of course we could have, just like we could have stopped Rwanda, just like we could be stopping Sudan right now. But we didn’t then and we don’t now and the reasons aren’t all that dissimilar. Could France or England have significantly aided the Jews’ attempt to remain in existence? Of course, just like they could do more now in Africa. But they didn’t and they don’t and the reasons aren’t all that dissimilar.
When I was a kid liberals (which were the only people I talked to, even then) said, “The Holocaust happened because we let it happened.” Nice thought, really--quite the grown up, 12-step-program answer. But the real truth is that the Holocaust happened because we wanted it to happen (and by “we” I of course mean “white people”). White people, in Europe especially, hated the Jews. Hated. Not in some passive “boy I wish my daughter didn’t like dating Jewish guys” but in an aggressive “If I ever see that Jewish [insert slur here] around my daughter I will [insert violent homicidal action phrase] him.” I’m not saying that every white person in Europe wanted Jews to be hunted down and exterminated (again with the rats and roaches). I am saying that when faced with the false choice of “death to all Jews” or “Jews controlling your country, dominating its resources and taking your money,” people were all too willing to believe that those were the only options, and it wasn’t a hard to make a choice for most of them. You might say that, well, anybody would rather kill an “other” than give up their country. I’d simply direct you to Vichy France. I’d simply remind you that many of the same French people who were quite happy to live under the yoke of an entirely different county were also very willing to sell Jews out by the attic full. When national pride and identification is so easily trumped by racial hatred, you’re going to have genocide. The only question is when.
There are many arguments as to why a “Blackocaust” could never happen in America, but I am going to throw out all the ones that can be reduced to “America is just better” or “more enlightened.” We are not. Anybody who believes otherwise should try learning to read. Our democratic traditions will not change the point. Hitler rode in on a wave of popular support and while I’m not comparing the two, America has so far managed to elect an illiterate buffoon to the oval office, twice. So it’s safe to assume that the right demagogue could be both evil and popular at the same time. I’m also going to throw out all the arguments that can be reduced to “black people won’t let it happen to them.” This is one of the biggest post WWII problems for Jewish people and especially for the state of Israel. The Jews did not “let” the Holocaust happen. They resisted along every means of resistance known to man. They fought with every tool or weapon at their disposal. But nobody helped them. And then didn’t have a homeland to run to. Like we saw with Katrina, when forces are bearing down on you and you don’t have the strength to fight them all at once, when you need help and nobody helps you, when you have nowhere else to go, you die. And die they did. They died, and the world needs to stop trying to clear its conscious by blaming them for it. And by “them” I could literally be talking about either the Katrina victims who “didn’t leave” or the Holocaust victims who “didn’t fight.” It just goes to show that America is not fundamentally better or more moral than Industrial Europe, and African-Americans are no more prepared to fight Apache attack helicopters than Jewish people were able to fight Panzers.
So there are really only two good arguments left. The lesser of the two says that a Holocaust won’t happen again because it has already happened before and the world will not forget. I’d like to believe that, but we’ve already forgotten why it happened before in any actionable way. We’ve already forgotten the steps that must be taken to prevent another one … look at Africa if you don’t believe me. The last Holocaust survivors are about to die, it won’t be more than a generation or so before the world has no functional memory of this great tragedy outside of Israel. Pretty soon, and in some places already, children will learn about the Holocaust the same way they do about slavery. That it was something that happened, a very long time ago, that was very bad, but some other people did it and they are all dead, and we are lucky to live in a world where that kind of thing can’t happen anymore. The world has the collective memory of a goldfish and the Holocaust will be no different.
The last argument, the one I find most intriguing, is that African-Americans will not suffer the fate of their Jewish brothers because the African-American holocaust has already happened, is still happening, and will continue to happen so that white people won’t need to utilize industrial elimination. Why would we need prison camps when we’ve already got a justice system that does a pretty good job rounding up most of the blacks anyway? Why would we need to gas them when we’ve already flooded their neighborhoods with enough crack-cocaine that they can do a pretty good job of killing themselves? Hey, any black person that escapes our prison/drugs checkpoint is always just one rape charge/audit/ “unforeseen natural disaster” away from being cast right back down where they belong, and oh, I’m sorry was that a cell phone in your pocket? I thought it was a sub-machine gun, and I shot before I asked the question.
In a very sick way it is comforting to think that America’s domination of blacks will continue to obviate the need for mass genocide. The problem with that thought though is that things are as likely to get better as not, for a time. Notwithstanding the past 6 years or so, America is still a powerful and economically viable nation. There is still more than enough money to go around (at least if you don’t have to buy any gas ever). Our time at the top may well be nearing its end, but we should enjoy a relatively long decline phase. My mother in her lifetime went from not being able to drink out of certain water fountains to being able to send her children to whatever university she damn well pleased. The NFL has no black owners but they do have six black head coaches which is six more than they had when I started watching football 20 years ago. As crappy as things are for African-Americans things are better now than they were 50 years ago (which should tell you all you need to know about how terrible things were 50 years ago). If history is our guide then history suggests that things will get better before things turn unimaginably horrific. As America declines, it might well be the ability of African-Americans to do better than they have historically, juxtaposed against a white America that suddenly finds itself doing worse than it is accustomed to on the world stage, that turns racial oppression into violence. The better we do, the stronger the reaction.
All great empires fall and when they do all faltering societies turn violently on their weakest citizens. Europeans turned on the Jews, Romans turned on the Catholics, Mayans turned on whomever the hell they were sacrificing 1000 at a time when the Spanish started stealing their stuff. It is foolish to hope that somehow America will be any different. Why shouldn’t our end be marked by the same violence and social chaos that has ridden on the horse of global repositioning since the recording of history? The Blackocaust won’t look like the ones that have preceded it. It will look … unimaginable.
When America is poised and ready for her final fall, something will happen, it won’t be pretty, and this time they’ll be coming for me.