"Love, rage, and solidarity with the people of Ferguson" : Cindy Milstein

"We learn history badly in this nation, if we learn it at all. It is well erased, well whitewashed, displaced from the visual landscape and sociopolitical scrutiny, or frozen into mythic stories of the founding fathers' wisdom unfolding over the decades into increasing largesse in the forms of women getting the vote or blacks gaining civil rights. In this dream there is equal opportunity, upward mobility, blind justice, melting pots of gold.

 

But a place without memory, a place that willfully masks the complexities of the intertwining legacy of freedom and domination, is a space of nightmares. It is a place doomed not only to forget and repeat, but to evolve increasingly barbaric and murderous forms of social control that benefit from this amnesia.

 

In 1915, D. W. Griffith's released his film "The Birth of a Nation" (originally called "The Clansman"). Its most appalling scenes, like the one pictured here, are often excised from the movie when it's shown -- yet another erasure of sorts. Because in the film's full version, it too clearly grasps the heart of the dominant origin story: white racist Christian males (embodied by the KKK) birthing a great nation by killing off blacks.

This film may be fictional, but its theme builds on too much reality, too much of the factual origin story and continuing legacy of what grounded this place. The key to unlocking that truth of the intertwining legacy of freedom and domination in terms of US history resides in one simple word: racism. It's been a racism directed toward many different groups considered, always or at various times, people of color on this continent, whether already resident here before colonization or immigrating later. But the "birth of the nation" has been particularly shaped by racism against blacks, perpetrated by an ideology of white supremacy.

 

There no way to make sense of the intertwining legacy of freedom and domination in the United States, much less any way to make it visible, without tying it to the logic of institutionalized racism against blacks in particular from the beginning, including when two black slaves were brought by the Dutch East India Company to the tip of what is now Manhattan in the initial acts of colonization, stretching to the growing slave trade, slave-plantation system, lynchings, abuse and misuse within wagework settings and labor unions, Jim Crow, redlining, prison-industrial complex, targeted repression and disproportionate police force used on blacks, and so much in between.

 

That Mike Brown and so many other young black men, and black women and black kids and blacks of all ages, are killed by police (and others) for no other reason than being black is not some mistake of justice, nor something that is an aberration or due to "bad apples" or outside history.

 

It is precisely our history of these United States.

We can only make a break with history, compassionately birthing new forms of freedom that increasingly lessen all forms of domination, if we see US history's intimate connection to the murderous logic of today's United States."

Love, rage, and solidarity with the people of Ferguson