Projection

One of the most common psychological mechanisms of our perilous time is projection. Simply Psychology defines it as a “psychological defense mechanism proposed by Anna Freud in which an individual attributes unwanted thoughts, feelings and motives onto another person” (www.simplypsychology.org).  A simpler way of putting this is: 

“It’s not me that has the problem or quirk or nasty habit, it’s you.” 

It should come as no surprise that the current President of the United States uses this mechanism routinely, almost automatically. His constant criticism and ridicule of others can usually be seen as stemming from attitudes or actions that he himself is guilty of. For example, just recently he criticized his opponent, Joe Biden, as a “stupid person.” One can easily see that he has projected the almost universal criticism of himself onto Joe Biden. We can see the same mechanism operating in his endless tirades against mail-in ballots as hopelessly corrupt; for it is clear that Donald Trump himself, given the chance, would cheat on a mail-in ballot; which, in this case, is demonstrated by his having recently recommended that his voters should, in fact, use mail-in ballots, and then go to their polling stations and vote again. Voting twice is clearly illegal, but the point is that it demonstrates how Trump thinks everyone will act if given the opportunity—everyone with his limited ethical sense, that is. And how about his excoriating of Joe Biden for nepotism in procuring a board membership for his son Hunter in Ukraine, while Trump has long since set up Ivanka and the rest of them in the White House as “advisors.” Or lambasting Black Lives Matter protesters as “violent thugs,” when his supporters, at his urging, openly carry AR15s—one of whom actually shot three protesters, killing two of them?  Or hinting that QAnon-generated conspiracies are believable, and that only he, the president, the savior, can save children from the satanic ‘Hollywood liberals’ who seek to sexually abuse them (this from the man who openly describes his daughter as a juicy piece, and who hung out with notorious teen enslaver Jeffrey Epstein) and even eat them? The list about the president is endless, but we don’t have to remain with him. We can go further afield to look with the same lens at the scandals involving fundamentalist icons. How many famous (or infamous) preachers have we now discovered committing the very sins of the flesh which they routinely inveigh against? Take Ted Haggard, founder and former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs CO, who also served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 2003, and has preached repeatedly against sexual sins, especially same-sex marriage. In 2006, Haggard was accused by a male prostitute and masseuse of paying him for sex for three years running, whereupon Haggard was removed from most of his official posts. The same, of course, could be said of countless Roman Catholic priests, who preach on Sunday about avoiding the sins of the flesh, and then sexually abuse their altar boys, whenever they get the chance, which turns out to be quite often. In each case, we have a projection of what is interior (usually hidden), to an exterior target that can be vilified.

            We might even say that the basic mechanism of projection forms the main strategy of the whole right-wing movement. Right-wing conservatives are generally people who have a suspicious attitude toward human nature. That is, they perceive most humans as weak animals who are generally inclined to do bad things; brutish and nasty things. This being the case, societies, according to them, must enact all kinds of laws and prohibitions to keep these damaging human impulses in check, for without them, the “law of the jungle” would prevail: the strong would dominate the weak and anyone else they could overpower. And the pattern would prevail up and down the chain of society. Men would abuse women and children; leaders would abuse their subjects; anyone in power would abuse their underlings; all would engage in illicit activities run riot—sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. And, to be fair, there is a grain of truth in this. But the main motivator of this attitude is not the truth, not real knowledge of human nature, but projection. Those who espouse this view, either overtly or covertly, are usually projecting the subconscious impulses that they can hardly admit into their consciousness, onto others whom they castigate as libertines and liberals and amoral socialists. It seems especially satisfying to do this with marginalized populations. ‘Jews steal babies and use them for their sacred blood rituals.’ ‘African Americans are by nature libidinous and lust after all women, white ones in particular.’ ‘Southern Italians ditto. Latin Americans double ditto.’ ‘All of them are prone to disobedience of the law, and hence inherently criminals, because it’s in their blood.’ The truth is that, pre-Civil War, it was the white southern slave masters who were truly libidinous, witness the commonplace result—millions of their mixed-race progeny who also became slaves. And witness the widespread lawlessness of corporate heads and their insider deals, which the wealthiest of these corporate bigs exploit without a backward glance, while demanding law and order and the merciless incarceration of petty thieves and small debtors and drug addicts (except when the addicts are white; then they require our understanding). The truth is that such morally righteous defenders of the status quo are the biggest violators of all, for it is their own impulses, sometimes known, often unknown, that drives them to project them outward onto convenient scapegoats. 

            The interesting thing about Trump, though, is that, unlike with common projection, where the aim of attributing an impulse to others is to keep the act or tendency suppressed from one’s own consciousness, his projection involves actions that he has committed already, or intends to commit. In other words, the president often seems not to be hiding these impulses to protect his ego (which is the classic reason for projection in the first place), but rather knows what he has done or wants to do, and consciously shifts the blame onto someone else, usually an opponent or rival. This appears to be the case, for example, in his mail-in ballot diatribes. He knows that Republicans have used every trick available to suppress the vote, to discard ballots from urban dwellers on flimsy grounds—to cheat, as journalist Greg Palast has insisted they cheated in 2016. Trump has even admitted that his party could not win if everyone (especially those untrustworthy minorities) got to vote. So it’s not that he wants to keep the cheating impulse from becoming conscious; it already is conscious. The same is true of his comment that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged” (said at a campaign rally in Oshkosh, WI, August 17, 2020). He seems to know instinctively that what he really means to say is that he, Donald Trump, will rig the election if he possibly can. 

            Of course, one can never really know whether a person consciously knows that he or she is being truthful or dishonest or self-protective when employing projection. And it is clear that Trump’s narcissistic ego is so fragile, so childlike, that it needs a great deal of protection—which accords with the observation that “projection is considered ‘primitive,’ because, being an easy defense to do, it happens early in childhood development first” (Grant Hillary Brenner, Psychology Today, 9/9/2018). But it is also clear that, in the president’s case, at least, his ego consciously deflects blame as a primary impulse for an action he knows full well he is already guilty of—as for instance, his recent determination to defend his early lies about the deadly dangers of Covid-19, insisting that the lies were presidential attempts to shield the American people from the despair they’d feel if he told them the truth. The president, that is, seems constitutionally unable to take responsibility (much less blame) for anything that does not reinforce his sense of himself as exceptional, as a genius who never makes mistakes. While the truth is that he has made some doozies—constantly downplaying the risks of Covid-19, as the death toll among Americans has risen to nearly 200,000 as of early September. But he cannot accept that mistake (even though it was recorded on tape by Bob Woodward) and, therefore, cannot reverse the course he has set for himself and the nation. No, like the habitual liar and projector he is, the president prefers instead to blame China, or the now-sidelined Dr. Anthony Fauci for his own failures, all while bragging about his administration’s performance (actually the worst in the world), and predicting an imminent vaccine that will rescue him from the infamy that will surely be his legacy. 

            This constitutes the real toll that a nation pays for having narcissists, who habitually use the mechanism of projection, in charge of the affairs of state. The toll is mass death, the toll is the crippling of the most important functions of the nation, all of which are meant to protect the public, not the ego of its leader. And we are soon going to see if enough Americans wake up to this mortal peril before it is too late.

 

Lawrence DiStasi

            

 

Fascism For Real

I have been around for a good long time, having entered political activism in the early 1960s when I was in graduate school. In those heady days of demonstrations, mainly against the Vietnam War then raging, the term ‘fascism’ was tossed around rather loosely, I thought. Everyone who did not oppose the war or who voted for it or screamed at us demonstrators as we marched (usually hard-hat construction workers), was characterized as ‘fascist.’ We said it and wrote it all the time, but for myself at least, it was a mostly rhetorical device. It was really the retort to all those shouts of ‘commie,’ ‘pinko,’ ‘queer’ that we were routinely met with. For what is the opposite of ‘commie’? Why ‘fascist ‘of course. And I think that’s the way most of us used it and thought of it. We called Johnson a fascist. And Nixon a fascist. And McNamara a fascist. And General Westmoreland a fascist. And the police fascists.

            It’s different now. With fifty more years of nonstop police brutality aimed mostly at Blacks, with militias armed to the teeth stoking and hoping for a race war, with the President of the United States lauding people in Nazi gear as “fine people,” with the President’s supporters impervious to reason or even facts—including the videotaped police shootings of unarmed black men, often in the back—with the majority of the Republican Party finding 180,000 deaths (half of whom are minorities) from Covid-19 as “acceptable,” and with major media figures like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter praising the 17-year-old cop lover who gunned down three protesters in Kenosha Wisconsin as a hero who should be president, and the police simply letting that same gunman walk away with his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder in plain sight while they, the same police, attack unarmed protesters screaming that this kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, had just shot three people, two of whom were dead—with all this and more, fascism appears no longer to be a rhetorical device. The threat of fascism taking over in this nation, in some form or another, is now very real indeed. As Allen Ginsberg once wrote: “America, this is quite serious.”

            And that’s how I’m feeling now. Outraged and disgusted and incredulous that such a large percentage of Americans (including many of my distant relatives) actually believe this serial liar and fraud and sexual deviant and serial bankrupt and money launderer and illiterate piece of narcissistic excrement who now sits in the White House. They actually believe him; believe that he is their savior; believe that he has brought them protection and safety from the hordes of “others” he says are out there seeking to take everything away from them; those hordes enabled, they believe, by the coastal elites, who see them as beneath contempt. And in a way, it is true. They are contemptible. For being so gullible that they can’t see through the con, can’t see they are being manipulated in the same way southern plantation owners once manipulated poor whites in the South: by offering them the freed slaves to look down upon; by showing them that no matter how poor or illiterate they were, they were still white and therefore several steps above the bottom dwellers, forever superior to those freed black slaves. In short, fed them a steady diet of white supremacy. The same has been done to many of the ethnic groups like my own, Italian Americans, who were racialized and scorned when they first arrived around the turn of the 20^th century, when they were said to be another race, closer to Africans then Italians. Unfit to be Americans, they were said to be; the detritus of Europe; fit only to be sterilized and work in sewers. But after a couple of generations, and much toil, they, most of them, have been granted that unassailable ticket to Americanism—whiteness. The price for the ticket being the age-old one in America: to become racist. Which must have seemed a fair price to pay for that one privilege: to be above, no matter what your earnings or position has been, and, regardless of your heritage, able to look down upon those people of color who occupy, and must always occupy the bottom rungs of the social ladder. And that is what is at stake for most of them, the Trump lovers. Staying at least that one rung above the bottom, retaining that hard-won place that now seems threatened by the darkening of America. And they are right. Their unquestioned place is indeed threatened; because America is, in fact, turning into a nation where people of color will soon, if they don’t already, outnumber “whites.” Which to me, is a good thing, long long overdue. Not to them. To them it looms like an ‘existential threat.’

            It is a truism, at least, that when people are threatened, they will resort to any scheme, any rationale to prevent and fend off the perceived threat. Germans in the thirties are a type case. In the face of their defeat in WWI, and the draconian reparations that bankrupted their nation, and rocketing inflation, they were putty in the hands of the Nazis who both gave them an age-old threat to focus on—the Jews in their midst—and a promise of a return to the glory they loved to see as their heritage—their dominance over all of Europe and the world. And so they succumbed to the madman who was also a great conman. And it took only a few years for their nation, along with the flower of their youth, to be destroyed, utterly. Now we are going to see if the same fate is in store for the United States of America. For the conman is, unbelievably to many, in power. And he has harped on and hinted at and exaggerated the threat, which is, in some senses, real. It is the threat outlined above: that the privileged place of whiteness, long the linchpin of our entire Republic and enshrined in our Constitution, is in danger of giving way. And the demographics bear this out. And the unquenchable nostalgia for the days when the perks of whiteness were not just in place but unchallenged, the days before the Civil War for some, the days before the equal rights amendments and the Civil Rights laws for most, and before Brown v. Board of Education and mixed-race marriages and the right to sit and eat and live and play and go to school together with ‘those’ people—the days before all that liberal claptrap, might come again. And though it is manifestly a pipe dream, it still seems to have power for too many. And it is that power—Make America Great Again, which is to say, white again—that holds the promise, or should I say the threat, of fascism.  

            Now, with the Black Lives Matter movement galvanized by the police murder in plain sight of George Floyd, and most recently with Officer Rusten Shesky’s shooting in the back, also on video, of the unarmed Jacob Blake as he was trying to enter his car containing his three young children while Shesky, holding onto his shirt, fired seven bullets into him; and with the shooting by Kyle Rittenhouse of no less than three protesters of the Blake shooting (two of whom died), and being allowed by those same police to walk away without even a question about the AR-15 he was carrying (this young white boy was apparently earlier given a bottle of water, together with his white militia buddies, as a token of the policemen’s thanks for “helping out”), and allowed to travel twenty miles to his home in Illinois before being arrested the next day; and with the Kenosha police chief essentially blaming the victims for their own deaths because they were out “protesting” in the first place; and with news at the same time that this coziness between cops and militias is not at all unusual since many other police forces in this nation have forged ties with these same vigilante militias (see “White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US: a former FBI agent has documented links between serving officers and racist militant activities in more than a dozen states,” The Guardian, Aug. 27, 2020.), with many cops signing on as actual militia members—now it appears that law enforcement and its apparent animosity towards black and brown people is no accident perpetrated by a few ‘bad actors,’ but rather, looks to be built in. Racism left over from the original slave patrols that tracked down escaped slaves, and returned this “property” to their masters; in time morphing into what we in white America now take to be ‘neutral’ police protecting American lives and property; but still with that racist origin pervading much of what we call “law enforcement.” 

            I can still remember the surprise of us mostly white protesters demonstrating against the war, and suddenly realizing that here, in our American streets, the situation had changed; the relationship with law enforcement had changed. It was no longer the friendly cop on the beat chatting with the neighbors and looking out for the kids. Now they were armed, in  riot gear, and threatening to those very same grown-up kids. Now they seemed eager, especially in Chicago, to beat on those kids with billy clubs and tear gas, white or not. Commies. Pinkos. Queers. Disrespecting the flag and the government and the troops fighting so you cowards have the right to exercise your damn constitutional rights. And we suddenly understood what our black brothers had warned all along: watch out for cops. They’ll kill you. Even so, we knew, most of us, that we were armed with that invisible shield: whiteness. And also that there are large portions of the American public who are not so armed and have never, in over 400 years, been so armed; and the recent fight has erupted, once again, over their promised access to simple justice. 

            Nor is it only over black and brown equality either. Now it’s over equality, or rather mass inequality, period. Over the obscene spectacle in the United States of a few billionaires like Gates and Bezos and Buffet not only controlling more wealth than half the population, but growing unbelievably richer as the Covid-19 virus devastates and impoverishes the rest of the population, especially, most viciously and disproportionately, those same people of color who are dying at a rate as obscene as is the wealth of the mandarins. And many people, particularly among the younger generations but including this aging writer, are finding this grossly unequal access to privilege, to the basics of life itself, too nauseating to stomach any longer. 

            It is too nauseating to see police shooting an unarmed black man in the back, while allowing a white kid armed to the teeth to simply walk away. To see that the difference, in the eyes of the police, is the one distinction that always matters in America, the color of a person’s skin. To see that if you are black or brown, any encounter with the police, no matter how mild, no matter one’s cultural status or wealth, can result in death. Which means, unequivocally, that the entire sordid history of race enters every police confrontation in this country, and that that history often dictates that a black man might well walk away or try to escape rather than put himself at the mercy of a cop liable to be carrying that history in a way that incites either fear or loathing and, ultimately, the firing of his/her weapon with lethal effect. It happened to Trayvon Martin. To Breonna Taylor. To twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. To Jacob Blake and to countless others in recent years, and going on back to routine lynchings and burnings throughout the nation, and with the same purpose: intimidation. Don’t get too uppity or you’ll die. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the hands of the police. It could well be, now, with the encouragement of the police themselves, and of the current President, death at the hands of some 17-year-old kid who thinks it’s cool to join a militia and go hunting for “those” people. 

            Yes, we seem to be at a tipping point in this America. And the protests in the streets are only one visible part of it. There’s also this virus raging, and the same people who think it might be cool to gun down protesters, are also joining with this unhinged president in their own protest—against the universally-prescribed cautions from medical experts that the way to prevent the virus’s spread is to wear masks—to protect others, not oneself—and maintain social distance. Very simple, and apparently commonsensical. Instead, the militia types, the ones who love to shout about their “freedoms,” characterize mask wearing and social distancing as violations of those American rights. Refusing to wear masks like their President, they prefer sometimes violent confrontations with clerks and service workers who try to implement those safety codes. As if nowhere in America are there any rules that these ‘free spirits’ have to obey to keep others safe. Ditto with rules to prevent pollution of the environment, or initiatives by the global community to bring arguably the greatest threat to humanity in history—global warming—under at least minimal control. Fuck that, they say. Fuck that, says their heroic president. Fuck that, say the big oil companies who hide their mercenary reasons behind the rubric of “rights.” We’re free and independent; we have rights; we can do anything we want. And the world burns. And the president piles gasoline on the flames. 

            Perhaps most relevant to this discussion are the recent moves, authoritarian to their core, by Drumpf to throw gasoline on the most fundamental act in any democracy—voting. Even above and beyond the traditional Republican attempts to discourage and prevent minorities in urban areas from voting, such as gerrymandering and poll closings and voter ID laws, are this president’s moves to steal the 2020 election—the preeminent initial move of every fascist regime. Appointing one of his biggest donors to be Postmaster General (done at a time when it had become clear that mail-in voting would be a preference for many people not wanting to risk contagion from Covid-19 by traditional in-person voting), the President apparently hoped, with this move, to discourage and disable voters from mailing in the ballots that would certainly favor his opponent. And new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was happy to oblige, ordering post offices to stop allowing overtime to ensure that the day’s mail was delivered, removing mail boxes in target states, and dismantling dozens of automatic mail-sorting machines. This sabotage of the postal system has been defended by DeJoy as part of his “cost-cutting” measures to “save” the service, when everyone knows of the long-running project of conservatives to privatize this most valued governmental service, not to mention Drumpf’s naked attempt to tip the election in his favor. But that’s not all. This fascist wannabe has speculated about suspending the election (because of the virus he scorns, of course) and pre-emptively tweets that even if the election goes off on time, even if the intimidating tactic of sending police to polling stations doesn’t reduce turnout in cities, all mail-in ballots will  be corrupt, as will the whole election, and might not be settled for “months or even years.” Which sounds like a way of signaling that he will not accept the election results if he loses; and/or a way of signaling to his militia minions that they should be prepared to contest the election armed with their “right to carry” weapons in full view. And it seems to be working, at least among Republicans who, two-thirds of them, tell pollsters that “they don’t have confidence in the fairness of the election” (Sarah Abramsky, Truthout.org, Aug. 29, 2020). 

            So what do we have? The stage is being set for a portion of the public to find the 2020 presidential election “fraudulent,” and for the President to reject the results, and to blame his loss on “anarchists and left-wing extremists” who he alleges have taken control of the Democratic Party and its weak nominee, the “socialist” Joe Biden. Who, we are told, intends to impose Bolshevism and communism on the entire nation in order to “destroy our second amendment, attack the right to life, and replace American freedom with left wing fascism” (Drumpf, as quoted by Paul Street, Counterpunch, Aug. 28, 2020). Yes, the current president of the United States and his surrogates have said all this and more, screaming maniacally at their recent convention that our “sacred” American way of life, our freedoms, are now under attack not only by anarchists in the streets, but by the other party as well. With the implication that concerned Americans—the Kenosha Guard and the Proud Boys and the hundreds of armed militia “patriots” documented by the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right as having intimidated protesters in more than 300 counties this summer alone (see Financial Times, Aug. 28), including  the fully-armed militia-types who occupied the gallery of the Idaho State House in Boise recently to protest the state order to wear masks and, like Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, got away without so much as a parking ticket because, according to Idaho State Police spokeswoman, Lynn Hightower “Idaho State Police personnel determined they could not have made arrests on the spot without elevating the potential for violence” (NPR.org, Aug. 25, 2020)—especially concerned Americans with guns, the President implied, ought to take action in the event of his defeat. 

            Now whether it will be Trump—which may seem doubtful given his deficiency in brain cells and courage—or one of his more smooth-talking, dangerous successors like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, or even some unknown nut case from Q-Anon, the conspiracy theorists who claim to have evidence of left-wing liberals and Hollywood types engaging in demonic child sex rituals and even eating babies—the stage has been set for some sort of authoritarian rejection of our weak-kneed democracy, and its replacement by a strong man to root out the alleged evil. Several nations around the world—Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, India, Brazil—have already gone this route. But can it happen here? Only time will tell. But unless the American public—the public still in possession of its faculties and a rudimentary sense of truth and ethics, that is—comes out en masse in November to reject in a landslide such a takeover, it very well could. Some form of fascism could, that is, given the multiple stresses on the nation and its increasingly frightened populace seeking a simple solution, happen here. And considering the racist history of this nation, and the immense threats for humanity stemming from the ignorant dismissal of the real crises, and the inclination of many toward those simple-minded solutions, we’re all going to need more than a shrink, or a few pills, or even the friendly glance of the  almighty, if it does. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

   

Origins

  

Lewis Dartnell’s book, Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History (Basic Books: 2019) contains surprising gems, like this one: 

“We are a species of apes born of the climate change and tectonics within East Africa” (p. 25).

 

Or this one:

“There’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite sides of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world” (46).

 

Which is to say that we humans are all one species, more alike than the surface characteristics that divide us suggest, and all derived from “a single exodus event out of Africa, rather than multiple waves of migration, and probably from no more than a few thousand original migrants” (46). Furthermore, what seems to have driven our one primate ancestor to develop our most distinguishing characteristic—a huge brain—was the adversity of extreme climate variability in the tectonic rift valley of East Africa. That’s because, as Dartnell informs us, 

“Intelligence…is the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body” (19). 

 

And so, in three of these rapidly shifting climatic events in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley (occurring roughly 2.7, 1.9 and 1 million years ago), new hominin species, marked by greater brain size—including Homo Erectus, the direct ancestor to our species—emerged. This latter is important, since some Homo Erectus left Africa in the variable climate phase around 1.8 million years ago, to eventually become Neanderthals in Europe; while those who stayed in Africa gave rise around 300,000 years ago, to anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. They, in turn, migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. So both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are our ancestors, both deriving from that big-brained Homo Erectus. 

            The other important takeaway from this book is the somewhat startling and humbling fact that the alleged ‘superiority’ of western or European culture is really an accident of geography, and a product of plate tectonics as well. As Dartnell explains it, the continent of Eurasia has benefited from its massive grasslands or steppes, where grains such as wheat, barley and oats (all variants of grasses) grew wild. This led to their cultivation, and then to more or less permanent settlements whose agriculturalists, thriving on grains, could set aside surpluses. This in turn led to priest classes who did not have to toil or spend time hunting and gathering, and eventually to kingly classes who could afford to go to war. But Eurasia was blessed with one other critical element: ruminants such as cows and horses, both of which fed on those expansive grasslands, and which could be used not only for protein foods, but for work such as pulling plows and wagons, and carrying individual humans. Indeed, Eurasia was home to the most important of the domesticated mammals:

The five most important animals through human history--sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses—as well as the donkey and the camel that provided transport in particular regions, were present only in Eurasia (88).

 

By contrast, the Americas, where the horse and the camel had actually evolved (both migrated out to develop in Eurasia), had only one domesticated ruminant, the llama, and very few other large mammals. So with these natural endowments, the civilizations of Eurasia were able to develop major technologies long before the equally sophisticated civilizations of the Americas—which also had grains such as corn that could be stored, but lacked those large mammals to boost their energy capacity. 

            It was not only the natural flora and fauna that provided for advanced civilizations, however. Again, plate tectonics provided the soil and water that seeded most civilizations—the Mesopotamians, the Harappans in India, the Minoans and Greeks and Tuscans, the Mayans and Aztecs. All of them developed, Dartnell informs us, “near plate boundaries.” Why? Because they are located where rich arable land formed in “depressed basins at the feet of mountains ranges caused by continental collisions” (27-8)—that is, huge tectonic plates smashing into each other and raising mountains such as the Himalayas and the Alps. The other element that contributes to such fertile land, of course, is volcanoes. And they too “arise in a broad line 100 Kilometers or so away from the subduction line, as the swallowed plate sinks deeper into the hot interior and melts to release rising bubbles of magma to feed eruptions on the surface above” (ibid). And further, such faults create springs “which become a water source for settlement in arid regions” (29). The Eurasian continent, according to Dartnell, had one other lucky advantage over the Americas: its orientation. Eurasia, that is, runs roughly east to west, whereas the Americas are oriented roughly north to south. That means that animals and crops that adapted to the grasslands of the Steppes could be utilized far to the west in Europe, and vice versa; their latitudes and hence their climates are roughly the same. Not so with the Americas: what works in Mexico’s climate and terrain will not necessarily work far to the north in Canada, and animals that thrive in The Great Plains do not adapt well far to the south in Peru (87-88).

            Beyond even this, Dartnell shows us how metals, too, are products of the massive movements of the earth, leading to the development of some civilizations due to the luck of their location. Consider the Great pyramids of Egypt, or the astonishingly advanced civilization of the Minoans on Crete. It is easy to think of them as the result of some superior endowment of their people, or of “genius” individuals. But more likely, it is the result of ancient processes deep in the earth. In the Egyptian case, the pyramids were built of limestone. And what forms limestone? foraminifera shells deposited on the sea floor of the ancient Tethys Ocean that once covered most of what are now the lands around the Mediterranean Sea—all that is left of the Tethys Ocean. These shells were, over eons, adhered together to become Nummulites (the word means ‘little coins’ in Latin), the foundation of the nummulitic limestone Egyptians used to build the pyramids (128). Similarly, the copper that made Minoans on Cyprus rich (around the second millennium BC, Cyprus was the major copper supplier for Mesopotamia, Egypt and the entire Mediterranean) was the product of an ocean vent pushed up onto Cyprus by plate tectonics. So too, iron and the process of smelting that transformed civilizations (in Europe from the 1300s on) and the weapons and tools they used, likewise comes from processes deep in the earth, and billions of years before that, in the furnace of the stars. Dartnell, in fact, calls iron “the star-killer element” (167) because 

once iron is created in nuclear fusion, the star can no longer produce enough energy to hold up its outer layers, and collapses on its own core, before exploding in a supernova.

 

And from that supernova comes all the iron deposited on our planet and in us, via many foods we eat. And iron, of course, is what makes our blood red, something else Dartnell startles us with:

…the iron in your blood not only links you to the ancient stars that created it in their nuclear forge, but also to the magnetic shield around our world that protects life on earth (169).

 

That is, the magnetic field acts like a “deflector shield” to prevent the solar wind particles from blowing our atmosphere off into space. All because of the lucky happenstance of iron. 

            There are many more amazing facts that Dartnell gives us—including how coal is produced due to the trees of the Carboniferous Era not rotting as normal trees do, but being preserved almost whole as peat, and then diving deep into the earth’s hot interior to rise again in the mountain rocks from tectonic events—but one had particular resonance for me personally. He describes the crucial role of the winds that we now know circle the earth in belts, and how critical they were when boats had to rely on winds to fill their sails. The so-called Age of Discovery depended on some of these wind discoveries, one of which the Portuguese discovered called the volta do mar: on their return trips from Africa, sailors would go north out into the ocean so as to exploit westerly winds (winds blowing east)—to get back to Portugal. This knowledge affected Columbus and his epic journey, but Dartnell calls his success “a sheer historical fluke.” Columbus, that is, had tried initially to convince King Joao of Portugal to sponsor his journey. The King declined, and so the great mariner had to turn to Queen Isabella of Spain. This meant that “Columbus attempted his crossing from an archipelago [the Canary Islands, the only Atlantic islands controlled by Spain] that happens to be upwind of the Americas. If his expedition had set sail from the Azores, it would likely have perished deep in the ocean” (230). That is, if Columbus had been sponsored by Portugal, he would likely have tried to sail from the Portuguese-controlled Azores against prevailing westerly winds (very difficult if not impossible in those days). Since he was sponsored by Spain, however, he headed west from the more southerly Canaries, caught the easterly trade winds, and driven by these favorable winds, made it to the Caribbean just in time to survive. On the return, he was clever enough to use the Portuguese-discovered volta do mar and the westerly trade winds, made it back first to the Azores, and then to Spain. 

            In sum, this is a book full of gems that are not commonly considered, and certainly not collected in one volume. And it’s written so that a layman like myself can understand most, if not all, of those ancient geological processes—which, as Dartnell tells us, have so fundamentally shaped our history and culture. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Exculpating Columbus

Carol Delaney (Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, Free Press: 2011) knows she has a problem in convincing a now-skeptical world that Columbus was not the generator of native subjugation he has been accused of in recent years. So she sets out to show that, far from “intending to commit genocide,” Columbus’s main objective was to garner the money and influence to get the Christian monarchs for whom he worked to launch a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims. As she writes early on: “The quest for Jerusalem was Columbus’s grand passion” (xvi). The problem is that even if this were the great mariner’s aim (and there is some doubt whether it was, or whether he used his conspicuously-expressed faith as a ploy to curry favor with the very Catholic Queen Isabela), it still does not excuse his behaviors. For there is no doubt that Columbus did send Native American slaves to Spain against the express wishes of Queen Isabela, nor that he was obsessed with finding gold (a percentage of which he insisted on claiming for himself), nor that he did set in motion the dreaded encomienda system which was, in effect, slavery, and which led to the decimation of the native population on the islands he “discovered.” Nevertheless, Delaney tries valiantly to convince us that Columbus was simply a devout man of his time, and that this poor mariner, son of a weaver, was intimately familiar with the Bible—not only the New Testament important to Christians, but the Old Testament, sacred to the Jews—at a time when most men of any class could not even read, let alone read and write in Latin or any other language. Yet we are shown how Columbus quotes almost entirely from the Old Testament prophets such as Isaiah, and Daniel, and Ezekiel, and from the Psalms, with a familiarity that is astonishing. Delaney even acknowledges that there have been scholars, Salvador de Madariaga most prominently, who have alleged that Columbus must have been a Jew, a converso who publicly and loudly professed Christianity (conversos who were suspected of secretly ‘Judaizing’ were subject to the tortures of the Inquisition), for one thing because only a Jew could be expected to know so much about the Old Testament. She even grants, in an endnote (p. 256, note 1) that “Columbus may have had a Jewish ancestor;” but in the same breath insists that he seemed unaware of it. 

            All this aside, Delaney’s passion to prove that her hero was a devout Christian who only wanted to save souls for Christ, comes through loud and clear. Perhaps too loud and clear. For it forces her to marshal arguments that sound more like special pleading than the work of a gennuine, i.e. disinterested, scholar. This is not to say that Delaney hasn’t done her homework. She has. And along the way she provides us with much compelling information about both Columbus the man, and the times in which he lived. But that cannot deter us from the fact that her mountain of information does not, in the end, make the case she wishes to make. Columbus, though a fascinating and often-sympathetic figure in her reading, remains stained by the accusations against him, mostly in his own words. Take one very important paragraph cited by Delaney near the end of her book. She is quoting from the Admiral’s lament to the world that he has been badly used by those (mainly Nicolas Ovando and Francisco Bobadilla) who have been given authority over the very lands he himself has discovered. Here is what he writes (Delaney attributes this to several sources, including the famous Lettera Rarissima he wrote to the sovereigns after the 4^th Voyage, July 7, 1503): 

What man has ever lived, not excluding Job, who would not have wished himself dead in my situation: seeking to save my life and that of my son, my brother and my friends. I was at that moment denied access to the very land and ports which, by the will of God and sweating blood, I had conquered for Spain (my emphasis).

 

It is those last few words that I think bear scrutiny. For Delaney has been arguing all along that Columbus’ true aim stems from his Christian faith, his mission to save souls for Christ, to find the means to liberate Jerusalem. And yet, what he writes here for all to see, is that he views himself not as a missionary, but as a conqueror. Another quote from his Letter to Dona Juana de Torres in 1500, reinforces this point:

I should be judged as a captain who went from Spain to the Indies to conquer a people numerous and warlike, whose manners and religion are very different from ours, who live in sierras and mountains, without fixed settlements, and where by divine will I have placed under the sovereignty of the King and Queen our Lords, an Other World, whereby Spain, which was reckoned poor, is become the richest of countries. (emphasis mine)

 

He has conquered a whole world for Spain, he says; and living in that world are a myriad of conquered people, whom his very first encounter with led him to write that “with fifty men, I could subjugate them all.” Which he subsequently did. Many of whom he sent to Spain as slaves—for that, according to Delaney, accorded with the laws of war. Conquered people could be enslaved, she writes. So could those who resisted Christianization. Or those who engaged in battle with Christians to resist the Christians’ violent depradations. No universal right to self-defense here—which is what native people had been doing all along: defending themselves. No. If you as a native resisted what Europeans—who claim to have “discovered” you—wanted to do to you, you were a combatant and could be enslaved at best, slaughtered at worst. 

            This is the kind of European arrogance that Carol Delaney wants us to accept as the excuse for all Columbus did (this arrogance is accentuated in the Papal Bull of 1493, issued by the notorious Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, which granted Spain all the lands ‘discovered’ by Columbus, and later divided the entire ocean between Spain and Portugal—not considering in either bull, needless to say, the existence of the millions of natives there). Though she is right that he himself did not commit, or even order genocide (which the most rabid of his detractors claim), she is also wrong, in this writer’s opinion, that Columbus was blameless. He was not. For he it was who almost immediately thought it was perfectly legitimate to seize six natives as specimens to display in Spain as ‘proof’ that he had found the Indies. And upon his return on the second voyage, he saw it as perfectly legitimate to send back to Spain, on Feb. 2, 1494, no less than twelve supply ships, consisting of “profitable materials from nature—including twenty-six Indians—from the man-eating Caribs” (p. 141). Note that Delaney is careful to add that the enslaved were cannibals, and more:

In doing this, he was following papal policy at the time, which permitted enslavement of those captured in a “just war,” those who resisted Christianization, or those who went against the law of nature (Delaney, p. 141).

 

In other words, Carol Delaney is justifying, in every way possible (she cites Columbus in his memo to the Queen, making the case that, by capturing the “unnatural” Caribs, Spain would gain great credit because the Indians would respond favorably to the Spanish system of justice by their eagerness to become the Queen’s vassals) what not even Queen Isabela, herself a devout product of her time, would do. And Carol Delaney admits this: 

When the sovereigns received Columbus’s memo, they responded that, in the future, they would prefer that he try to convert the natives while still in the islands…however, when he elaborated a plan to send more Caribs back as slavesas a way to defray the costs of supplying the settlement, the sovereigns demurred (142; all emphases mine).

 

In short, the Queen saw right through Columbus’s rationale for slavery, and tried to nip it in the bud. So did Bartolome de Las Casas, who lived in the islands for many years, and translated much of Columbus’s writing in his Historia de las Indias. Las Casas writes about this shipment:

In this notable document occurs the first mention of slavery in the New World. The Admiral directs Torres to inform the sovereigns that he has made slaves of some Indians captured (in) the cannibal islands, and has sent them to Spain to have them taught Spanish in order that they may later serve as interpreters.  The justification he advanced for this measure was that by taking (them) from their surroundings they would be cured of their cannibalism, converted to Christianity, and their souls saved…(Las Casas, as cited in Francis A. McNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings, (Nov. 2007).

 

Father Las Casas went on to elaborate what was worse, in his opinion: 

 

The next suggestion, despite any possible excellence of his motives, was a frank proposal to establish a thriving trade in human flesh as barefaced as could be made by the least scrupulous "blackbirder."  The Admiral, always dwelling upon the spiritual welfare of the cannibal natives, proposed that the more of them that could be captured, the better it would be, and then, mingling temporal advantages to Spaniards with spiritual blessings to the natives, he explained that the quantities of livestock and other necessaries required by the colonists, might be paid for by the sale of slaves sent back to Spain in the ships which would bring these supplies several times a year to the colony (Ibid). 

 

In other words, Fr. Bartolome de Las Casas was not fooled by Columbus’s protestations about his concern for “the spiritual welfare of the natives.” He saw through it, just as the Queen had, and condemned it. Especially, as even Carol Delaney admits, because “In reality, the distinction between ‘good’ natives and those who attacked the Spaniards and resisted Christianization was probably often blurred” (Delaney, 154). Furthermore, justifying slavery because of the customs of the enslaved (and an anthropologist like Delaney should know that cannibalism can be often attributed to conditions where a plentiful protein source is lacking, as it was on the Caribbean islands) simply won’t do. Arrogant conquerors backed by a Pope may justify the enslavement of a conquered people in this way, but history cannot accept this justification. 

            Then there is the encomienda system mentioned above. Though the islands were initially viewed as a place for setting up trading posts, soon grants of land were made to settlers who followed on subsequent voyages. And natives who lived on those lands were considered part of the property, and expected to pay tribute. Here is what Las Casas has to say about this:

Columbus laid a tribute upon the entire population of the island which required that each Indian above fourteen years of age who lived in the mining provinces was to pay a little bell filled with gold every three months; the natives of all other provinces were to pay one arroba of cotton. These amounts were so excessive that in 1496 it was found necessary to change the nature of the payment, and, instead of the gold and cotton required from the villages, labour was substituted, the Indians being required to lay out and work the plantations of the colonists in their vicinity. This was the germ of the cruel and oppressive repartimientos and encomiendas which were destined to depopulate the islands…(op cit, McNutt)

 

This cruel system, which made subjects of all the natives and forced them to first pay tribute and then labor for the Spanish, who had now become colonists, is blamed by Las Casas for no less than “depopulating” the islands. And how does Carol Delaney justify this part of Columbus’s legacy? First, she claims that the system of tribute was “nothing new,” as a similar one already existed with regard to Spanish land taken from Muslims, and given to Spanish hidalgos. Then she maintains that the original idea for the encomienda system was not Columbus’s at all, but rather that of the rebel leader Francisco Roldan, who had led a rebellion in the western half of Hispaniola. When Columbus went to meet him in 1498 to forge a truce, Roldan insisted on allowing his rebels to keep the land they had colonized, along with all the natives on them as laborers. Delaney says that this was the origin of the encomienda system, which even she describes as “quasi-serfdom” (179). But the fact remains that Columbus agreed to allow the encomienda system to be maintained, and not just in the rebel lands, but throughout the islands. Whether initially instituted by Columbus or simply ratified by him, it was a brutal system that led, as Las Casas maintains, to the depopulation of the islands. In his Brevissima Relacion, or Short Report of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1541, Las Casas gives us some idea of the extent of the damage:

whereas there were more than three million souls, whom we saw in Hispaniola, there

are to-day, not two hundred of the native population left.

 

Three million to two hundred. And this refers to just the one island of Hispaniola, which Columbus colonized first. Las Casas gives us more in this devastating text, but we mostly know the rest. 

            One final reference to Delaney’s book deserves mention. On her very last page, which encompasses her summary of the millennial age (which she claims explains why Columbus was so obsessed with liberating Jerusalem—it was believed, she writes, to be the precondition to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ to redeem the entire world), Delaney adds her own plea for ending the dangerous apocalyptic myth that still prevails. Here is what she writes:

How can we diffuse the power of the apocalyptic myth before its destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy becomes a reality? On that the fate of our world may depend (244).

 

These are her last words, the concluding words of her book, which for most writers are revised again and again, receiving intense scrutiny to get them right. The problem is, that scrutiny was either haphazard or in vain, for she uses the word “diffuse” (to disperse or spread widely) rather than “defuse” (to reduce the danger of, originally to remove the fuse from an explosive device). This appears to be a serious blunder, one which makes this writer, at least, question the value, aside from its other weaknesses, of her entire attempt to exculpate Columbus. 

Lawrence DiStasi

The Deadly Supreme Court

  The promise of equal citizenship had been “imperiled by judicial interpretation.”

This statement appears on page 126 of Eric Foner’s new book, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, (Norton: 2019). As I read this statement, I noted it as the real theme of the entire book, because while the title suggests that the 13^th , 14^th and 15^th Amendments in their pathbreaking establishment of the new and equal rights of 4 million former slaves, actually remade the U. S. Constitution (which they did—had they been fully implemented), the real story here is the extent to which the Supreme Court, in its rulings from about 1890 to the our own time, largely unmade that remaking. This is established in detail in the second half of Foner’s revelatory book. Decisions about murder and mayhem, about voting, about black employment, about the rights given to freed blacks by the three amendments, about whether not just political rights but ‘social rights’ could be guaranteed, about ‘separate but equal’ accommodations—all were subject to Supreme Court decisions. And in virtually every case, the Court allowed the revived power structure in the South to skirt the amendments and violate black citizens’ rights with impunity. In short, the systemic racism that even today is being contested in the streets of this country was given major impetus around the turn of the century by the highest court—the supposed ultimate arbiter of justice—in this land. It is a story that can’t help but infuriate any American with a conscience; and it certainly infuriated me.  

            But first, what were those three transformative Amendments? The first of them, the 13^th, outlawed both slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States. This reversed the covert approval of slavery that the Founders—many of them slaveholders themselves—allowed to pollute their new “free” Republic. No longer, after this amendment, could slaves be held in bondage and still be counted as three-fourths of a person so the southern states could have more representation in the Congress and the Electoral College. Which was, indeed, a major change, brought about at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives in the Civil War. So far so good. But there was a clause in the 13^th Amendment that led to more bondage: no slavery or servitude allowed, it said, “except as a punishment for a crime.” Predictably, the South instituted the so-called Black Codes to take full advantage of this loophole. In addition to limiting the movement of freed blacks, the Codes barred them “from following certain occupations, owning firearms, serving on juries, testifying in cases involving whites, or voting” (p. 48). But more than that, the Codes required all black men to sign a labor contract to work for whites, or be prosecuted for “vagrancy.” If convicted (which they invariably were), they were fined, and if they could not afford the fine (which most couldn’t), they “were forced to labor for a white employer” (48). Thus was involuntary servitude reintroduced for the “freed” former slaves. The Republican-controlled Congress tried to counter the Codes with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and though President Johnson quickly vetoed it, the Congress overrode his veto (it was the first override). The reprieve for blacks, if any, was short-lived, however. 

            The second of the transformative amendments, the 14^th, established “birthright citizenship.” The 14^th Amendment begins, 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws (xv).

As Foner notes, this Amendment “elevates equality to a constitutional right of all Americans.” Today, one might think this would be a ho-hum, but 4 million black men were, for the first time, now constitutionally equal to white men. This was a big deal. Equality was not complete, of course, as female suffragists were quick to point out: the use of the term “male inhabitants” left half of the adult population still unequal. But the Radical Republicans—even those sympathetic to female suffrage—decided that including female equality would fatally imperil passage, and so would have to wait for another time. Still, equality for black men was a major achievement. And when the 15^th Amendment was also passed two years later, jubilation by blacks and Radical Republicans was nearly universal. For the 15^th Amendment had formally established the right of former slaves, now citizens, to vote:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (xvii).

Frederick Douglass rejoiced: “Never was a revolution more complete.” The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison added that “Nothing in all of history” equaled “this wonderful, quiet transformation of four million human beings from the auction block to the ballot box” (112).  

            All this affirms the importance that Foner ascribes to these amendments. With the ratification of the 15^thAmendment by three-fourths of the states on March 30, 1870, the Constitution had truly been drastically changed. But despite its defeat in war, and the enforcement of the new rule by the military, the South was not by any means finished. Widespread violence quickly erupted to oppose the new amendments, perpetrated mainly by the Ku Klux Klan, which had been formed in Tennessee shortly after the War’s conclusion. Re-energized by the amendments, the Klan initiated a brutal campaign of assault, murder and arson, not only against newly freed black men who disputed with their white employers, but against Republican officials they called “scalawags,” and including sexual assaults against black women. Three Enforcement Acts were passed by Congress to combat the violence, and in 1871 and 1872, President Grant sent the U.S. Army to emphasize that the federal government’s power could and would enforce the laws. Grant’s military intervention effectively crushed the Klan, but again, though some 2500 criminal cases resulted, “fewer than half resulted in convictions” (121). Military or no, however, the real resistance to the equality revolution came, as noted above, from the United States Supreme Court. As the critique by the Brotherhood of Liberty made clear in its 1899 publication, Justice and Jurisprudence, “the promise of equal citizenship had been ‘imperiled by judicial interpretation’” (126). 

            Eric Foner explains this at the outset: “in almost every instance, the Court chose to restrict the scope of the second founding” (128). That is, it reduced all those ‘privileges and immunities’ that the new amendments had been so zealous to confer on the new citizens. More, it “drew a sharp line between civil and ‘social’ rights,’” meaning that discrimination by private businesses could not, in its interpretations, be interfered with. Finally, it “eventually concluded that segregation legally enforced by a state did not violate the equal rights of black Americans” (ibid). This is an astonishing conclusion, but Foner cites numerous cases to show that the Supreme Court justices actually did argue and did rule that segregation was legal (and, for many justices, inevitable and preferred.) Perhaps most alarming of all, the Supreme Court made a mockery of the 14^th Amendment—the one that importantly had “elevated equality to a Constitutional right” for those who had formerly been enslaved—and instead turned it into a “vehicle for protecting corporate rights.” That is, the Court struck down regulations meant to protect workers (many of them former slaves) on the grounds that such regulation “violated ‘freedom of contract’” which protected corporations’ rights under the Due Process clause. Talk about a perversion of justice! And what the Court did with respect to the voting rights newly awarded to the former slaves was even worse: it consistently ruled that “So long as disenfranchisement laws did not explicitly mention race, the justices refused to intervene even as the vast majority of the South’s African-American men lost the right to vote” (129). 

            Consider just a few cases, such as Bylew v. United States of 1872. The case stemmed from the grim ax murder of a family of four blacks (the Fosters) by two white men (Bylew and Kennard) in Kentucky. The issue was initially decided in federal court (Kentucky still forbid blacks to testify against whites in its courts) and resulted in a murder conviction and a sentence of death for the white perpetrators. But the State of Kentucky appealed to the Supreme Court, and it overturned the decision to convict by a 6-2 vote. The high Court’s decision hinged on the application of the word “affected” in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Act allowed the removal to federal court (which Bylew had been) only of cases “affecting” persons denied equality in state courts. Justice Strong declared in his opinion that only the parties to the case—the two murderers and the government—were here “affected.” This meant that neither black witnesses nor those who were murdered, were “affected” by the law protecting those denied their rights. Only the two murderers were so affected, it ruled, and they were not covered by the law. Ergo, according to the Court’s reasoning, the case should not have been decided in federal court, and the convictions of two white men who murdered four blacks was overturned! The rights of the state here were clearly seen as more important than the rights of either the black victims or the federal government. Likewise, the Civil Rights Act introduced by Charles Sumner in 1870 to confer public rights on the former slaves, was widely condemned by the Court as an excess exercise of federal power. 

            This hobbling of federal power had profound consequences, for in the 1870s, violence against Reconstruction again erupted. This time it was not the Klan, but “rifle clubs” sponsored by Democrats in the South. These bands of men didn’t bother to disguise themselves as the Klan had, but, encouraged by judicial sanction, openly attacked blacks trying to vote. This type of violence helped Democrats regain political control in both Alabama and Mississippi in the 1874 election. And because of the Supreme Court, the federal government was not able to protect black voters from such violence. In United States v. Cruikshank, for example, the case concerned the Colfax Massacre of 1873, which occurred after the 1872 gubernatorial election in Louisiana when a mob of whites murdered scores of black men. Some 98 person were indicted for conspiracy to deprive the murder victims of their constitutional rights (not to mention their lives). Though only three murderers were convicted, it was still a kind of justice. But when the case was appealed to the Supreme court (because two judges could not agree about whether the conspiracy had been racially motivated), Chief Justice Waite argued that most of the victims were “under the protection of the states” not the federal government. Moreover, the 14^th Amendment, he ruled, only applied when states violated basic rights, not when private citizens violated them—and thus the murders remained a matter for state courts to adjudicate. Therefore, those murdered by private citizens could not rely on federal law to protect them. As Foner notes, this only “encouraged further violence” (144), which regularly occurred. Chief Justice Waite also wrote the United States v. Reese decision, again overturning the lower court convictions of several officials who had “conspired to prevent blacks from voting in a local election” (146). Waite actually ruled that the 15^th Amendment “does not confer the right of suffrage on anyone” but only prohibited exclusion from voting for racial reasons, which had not been proven. Likewise, the Enforcement Act for voting was not operative because, rather than prohibiting interference with voting specifically because of race, it prohibited allinterference with voting, and was therefore not applicable. This perverse ruling subsequently encouraged southern states to erect all kinds of barriers to voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests which, by not mentioning race, effectively prevented most blacks from voting. Similar devices today, such as ID requirements, or closing polls where blacks vote, or gerrymandering, perform the same disenfranchising work.  

            One more set of cases should suffice—the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. These involved complaints by blacks in Kansas and Missouri and San Francisco who were denied accommodations in hotels, in railroad cars, and entry into specific seats in theaters and opera houses. The relevant law was Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Act of 1875 (Sumner had introduced it in 1870, but died in 1874 before it actually became law.) In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court wrote that most of Sumner’s Act was unconstitutional, “on the grounds that it sought to punish discrimination by private businesses, not the states” (151).  In other words, the Court reinforced its old distinction between political rights and social rights. Political rights could be protected; social or public rights could not. More than that, the Court, in the words of Justice Bradley, actually chided blacks for seeking “to be the special favorite of the laws,” because the kind of “enforced fellowship” they were seeking had the potential of changing “the freedom of blacks” into “slavery of the whites” (152). One’s jaw drops at the arrogance of this remark, except for the fact that the same kind of ahistorical complaints have been used in recent years regarding affirmative action in hiring or in college admissions. True, not every Supreme Court Justice was so dismissive; Justice Harlan dissented in several cases, asserting that discrimination regarding civil rights, whether by state law or by private citizens, was still a “badge of servitude” (153). And Thaddeus Wakeman, writing in Science, maintained the same thing: the purpose of the Amendments, he wrote, was clearly to include the whole panoply of civil rights under federal jurisdiction, but that intention was lost the moment they reached “that grave of liberty, the Supreme Court of the United States” (157). Sadly, these were minority views. 

            Just as sadly, as Foner points out, the William Dunning school of historians at Columbia University, which produced the first scholarly works on Reconstruction, followed the Supreme Court’s subtext, and essentially “condemned black suffrage as a dire mistake” (159). Dunning himself wrote that “acceptance of the reality of racial inequality must be the foundation of any stable social order in the South” (ibid). The Court often cited Dunning and his students in subsequent decisions, as it retreated from Reconstruction as if from a plague. In 1896, as just one example, Plessy v. Ferguson reached the Supreme Court to adjudicate the status of “Equal but separate accommodations” on the railroad in Louisiana. The Court had already upheld the conviction of a railroad company for not abiding by a Mississippi law requiring the segregation of passengers. In Plessy, it ruled that “so long as facilities were equal, the 14^th Amendment’s equal protection clause did not apply” (162). Justice Brown wrote the opinion, and it’s a doozy. “Whiteness,” he wrote, “was a form of property, and the railroad could be sued for devaluing it” (ibid). Homer Plessy, though able to pass for a white man, was not really white, he wrote, and therefore, was not entitled to the “reputation of being a white man.” The mind reels at this validation of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine by the highest court in the land. 

            There are more instances of this kind of racist blindness, of course, but the situation is clear enough. The final words of Foner provide the capstone, and the relevance of this book and these Supreme Court decisions to the battles in the streets even now going on:

            “…the shadow of the retreat from Reconstruction still hangs over contemporary jurisprudence” (174). 

Indeed it does, and it hangs over the entire nation, over each one of us, as well. 

Lawrence DiStasi

White Americans Will Have to Pay

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to note that I am of Italian descent (on my father’s side), and therefore heir to that wave of immigrants which arrived in the U.S. in the 1880s through the early 20^th Century. As many now protest, they had nothing to do with slavery, massacring Native Americans, or the suppression of people of color—especially since they themselves were considered ‘people of color’ when they arrived. Therefore, many of them find it appalling that they should be asked to suffer the loss of their putative hero, Columbus, or worse, pay for the upraising or favored treatment of blacks that is now being demanded. Many ‘white’ Americans clearly feel the same way. We had nothing to do with slavery, is the cry; why should we have to pay for it in any way—either by losing out to less qualified Blacks in hiring, or lose out to them in college admissions (via affirmative action)? And one can certainly understand the logic in this. 

            Indeed, after watching Heather McGhee’s excellent TED talk, “Racism has a cost for everyone,” one at first wants to subscribe to her idea that getting rid of zero-sum thinking (if you win, I have to lose), and coming to realize that all of us are in this together might just be a solution. Yes, we want to say, if we lift up Blacks and other people of color economically, we will all be uplifted. Conversely, she argues, clinging to the idea that keeping them down is the only way to preserve white privilege and wealth is erroneous; it costs us all to keep a major part of the population hedged off in ghettos where they are underserved and underpaid and harboring resentments sure to explode, one way or the other. In sum, to raise up one of us economically is to raise up all of us, white or black. And we respond, thinking yes, this is a way to enact racial and economic justice, and can be a way for all of us to win. That is, we white folks will not really have to lose, to pay for justice.  

            However, after really thinking about this, I have become convinced that it’s a bit of sleight of hand to persuade white Americans that racial justice and equality can finally be achieved in our time, without much cost. Without significant loss. And, if true, would certainly make the acceptance of such justice a little easier to swallow for most. But I think we are kidding ourselves on several levels if we do. There will be a cost to full social and economic equality, and my contention here is that whites in America should be prepared to give up some of their privilege in exchange for finally, after two-hundred-seventy years of hypocrisy, making America live up to its creed. 

            But why, many of my fellow Italian Americans would ask, should we have to pay? Neither we nor our ancestors perpetrated any of the racial crimes of slavery or Jim Crow or the extermination of Native Americans, so  why should we pay? The answer is simple. You have benefitted from those crimes from the moment you set foot on this soil. You have benefitted because of the simple fact that you are now considered ‘white.’ Yes, even though when you arrived, you were considered racially inferior and virtually ‘black,’ you very quickly made the devil’s bargain to stake your claim to whiteness. You saw that in America, even those initially considered ‘marginal’ could claim that ‘at least I am not black.’ And you embraced that claim, often giving up your initial impulse to befriend African American neighbors and co-workers, in order to do it. To become white. And to become that, to become American, you had to become racist. You had to embrace the idea that the racial line, especially in the neighborhoods you inhabited, were clearly demarcated—separated off from those neighborhoods that were ‘black’—and could not be crossed. All Americans imbibe that knowledge with their mother’s milk. And that becomes racial privilege. White privilege. Knowing that the houses and apartments in those ‘other’ neighborhoods have always suffered from undervaluation and neglect, at the very least. Then, when you returned from serving in WWII, as a ‘white’ veteran you could benefit from the G.I. Bill, which allowed, even encouraged you to get a government-subsidized mortgage on a house in the suburbs. This, in turn, allowed those of you who chose to, to move out of the crowded city and into the whiter suburbs. Whiter, because black returning veterans were excluded from the right to get those G.I.-Bill mortgages (the federal government excluded them, at least partly to get the bill passed by Southern congressmen—see Katznelson, Ira, When affirmative action was white: an untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century America, W.W. Norton 2006.) And because their neighborhoods were redlined (denial of financial services from banks and insurance companies), with the resulting values of the homes they might buy accordingly reduced. 

            The wealth white families in America were able to accrue from this one privilege amounted to the growing ability of succeeding generations of whites to send their children to college (the G.I. Bill also provided direct subsidies to vets to attend college), and in turn enter the ranks of the higher paid. That’s white privilege, or more specifically “affirmative action,” from just one government-sponsored favor. And there are countless others, both overt and covert. In sum, white Americans, though many protest that they are hardly privileged, are endowed with this one overriding privilege: they are white in a society that has always offered them the gold-plated ticket to every show, from police protection to the psychic protection of knowing that no matter how far they sink, they are still not at the bottom. 

            In exchange for that, white society is now being asked not only to allow African Americans entry into that privileged place, but to pay for the transition that will allow it. And though many are protesting—because they are convinced, zero-sum-game style, that any black gain means their loss, I contend that the just among them, among us, must be willing to pay. We must pay either with our perceived loss of favored status, or in what we will have to pay to compensate the descendants of slaves for what they have had to suffer (the idea that blacks all suffer from post-traumatic-slave syndrome, PTSS, gets to this idea, maintaining that even those who have never been enslaved or suffered from Jim Crow live with these horrible legacies in their psyches and their very genes*; see Dr. Joy De Gruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and/or www.joydegruy.com ), and what it will cost to bring many of them up to a decent level of living. And that’s going to cost money. The money will have to come from government (its policies have fostered black suppression, after all), which means eventually from the taxes we all pay. The question is, will white Americans be willing to pay it? Should they?

            I believe that they should, for many of the reasons outlined above. But more than that, we should be willing to pay for the simple reason that no society can endure for long with such glaring injustice and inequality, such a bitter history left intact. Because sooner or later, the rot from that injustice seeps into every part of our society and culture. This is what the massive demonstrations following the death of George Floyd are saying. That Black Lives Matter. And what a failure of culture that slogan implies—that any group of people in the alleged ‘home of the free’ has to explicitly put their lives on the line to insist that their lives actually matter. What kind of society so mistreats a whole group of people that they must publicly resort to that claim? We know the answer, and it is the shame of nations. 

            It is also the shame of nations that so many white Americans want to claim victimization by answering ‘what about us?’ The shame of nations that so many Americans fail to see the justice of that plea. Fail to see that without that justice, American society is a sham. Its claims to be that land of the free, that land of equality, of equal justice for all, are shams, hypocritical pretense. And mostly, it is the shame of nations that so many people refuse to see that finally making all people equal will make this, at last, a nation to be proud of, a nation worth living in. A nation where those who have are willing to share with those who have long been deprived of having. That I am my brother’s keeper, and that the deprivation of one is ultimately the deprivation of all. That human society must be built on the idea of common wealth, the idea that we all must share the bounty of the earth that is given to us by Nature, rather than subscribe to the lifeboat theory operative now, that each individual must seize and fight for his little piece of the planet (in the American case stolen, every inch of it, from the indigenous inhabitants), and kill for it if necessary.

            Can this happen? I am given hope by one fact only—that so many white, young people seem willing to put their lives on the line in demonstrations to demand this change. They are willing, this generation, to sacrifice some of their inherited privilege to bring change about. And we should all be grateful, and willing to open our pockets and our minds to join them. Because that, that willingness to share the common wealth, that willingness to see that sharing wealth is deeply ingrained in the human psyche and is the source of the only true happiness for humans, the pre-eminent social animal—that is the only way out of our American dilemma. We Americans have been sold a pernicious bill of goods—the notion that we must only look out for ourselves because that is our nature. It is a misreading of both human nature and of the Declaration of Independence. That declaration called not for the permanent independence of each human, to be preserved at any cost. It called for the independence of the United Colonies from British rule. But the economists and libertarians of our time insist that it means freedom from every obligation to other humans, and that is not only wrong-headed but the source of endless suffering and discrimination. No, what is truly human—from our primate cousins through every development of homo sapiens—is concern for others. Cooperation with others. Empathy for others. Sharing, as hunter-gatherers knew, the good fortune of one with those others who were not so fortunate in the hunt on any given day; because what one shared one day was returned by others who shared their bounty another day. And more broadly, coming to the aid of one in need, as any child of today still does to another child who cries. As most of us still feel the impulse to do. It is in our genes, in our brain cells (see the voluminous research on the function of ‘mirror neurons’ in promoting empathy in humans). And not only helps others, but helps us in doing so, literally promotes our happiness and well-being. 

            So yes, it can be done. But the question still is, will it be done? Especially by those who are committed, because they have been taught, to the perversion of the independence doctrine? Those who still choose to see through the lens of zero-sum-game thinking? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But in the end, it will not matter for long. The dinosaurs will eventually die out, and a new species, represented by those now demonstrating and those who follow them, will rule the day. And what they are saying, now, is that enough is enough. Four hundred years of cruelty and deprivation are enough. Four hundred years of white privilege and black poverty of opportunity are enough. And, finally, we are willing to share our privilege and pay to compensate for what has been stolen. And those of us who are no longer young, no longer able to march alongside them, but see the rightness of what they are doing, can applaud and cheer them on, both with our voices and with whatever support we can offer. And rejoice that at long last, the America that we have hoped for, the America that is truly a commonwealth, can come to be.

Lawrence DiStasi

*Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has conducted a depth of research into epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. In layman's terms, she is researching how serious incidents of trauma (i.e. slavery, holocaust, etc.) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be passed down through generations in shared family genes. Her research has revealed that when people experience trauma, it changes their genes in a very specific and noticeable way, so when those people have children and their genes are passed down to their children, the children also inherit the genes affected by trauma.