America the Brutalful

A look at how racism is interconnected with what it means to be American, right down to the Declaration of Independence.

By Kent Monroe

 

America! America! God shed his grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

~ “America the Beautiful”

for Sallie Devert

In 1916 the good folks of my home town, Erwin, Tennessee, lynched Mary the elephant. Mary, the star attraction for Sparks World Famous Shows circus, had killed her handler — a drifter named Red with no elephant handling experience — after he stabbed her abscessed tooth with a spear-tipped wooden rod called an elephant stick. After considering such execution methods as poisoning, or ripping her apart with locomotives — or even electrocuting her like the noble citizens of New York’s Coney Island had done to Topsy the elephant a few years back — they settled on hanging Mary from an industrial crane . The first chain broke, but they found a bigger chain, and Mary was finally hoisted in the air, shrieking and thrashing to the cheers and chuckles of the 3,000 witnesses, which included most of Erwin’s children.

A year later a black man named Tom Devert bought a house in Erwin. Tom, one of sixty-or-so black residents living in shacks outside the town proper, lived there because he worked for the C.C. & O Railroad. He bought the house for $3,500, with $1,000 advanced as a down payment. The next year, in 1918, Tom was shot and killed for supposedly sexually assaulting and abducting a 17-year-old white girl, who reportedly drowned in the Nolichucky River during the chase. Because Tom was indisposed by death, his account of the events was never told.

The posse of white men then dragged Tom’s body back to town. Every last black person around was summarily rounded up and forced at gunpoint to watch the public burning of Tom Devert’s remains. The following day every black soul in the county, including Tom’s wife, Sallie, fled and never returned. Tom and Sallie Devert’s home was sold a month later for $800, a fair market value for the property.

***

Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase!

~ Patrick Henry

Both my grandfathers were born in the heyday of American apartheid commonly known as Jim Crow, and both men, one a doctor, the other a house painter, referred to black people as niggers in my presence as a child. Even though each man’s words expressed America’s social pathology, they resonated very differently.

My fraternal grandfather, Pappy, was a surgeon, a man of means and status who descended from the same order of men who led the American colonies’ revolt from Great Britain, ostensibly more to realize a nation built upon the ideal of a sanctified freedom, a transcendent individual liberty, than the creation of a protectorate  for the unfettered accumulation of wealth. By the time of the American Revolution, however, the nexus of power had already formed, and it was addicted to slavery. In his book “Capitalism and Slavery,” the historian Eric Williams notes:

“Here then is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. As compared with Indian and white labor, Negro slavery was eminently superior.” [1]

Because slavery existed in opposition to the lofty claims of liberty, however, the founding fathers faced both a moral and a credibility dilemma.

Before America, slavery was primarily the condition of vanquishment. If your tribe was conquered by another, you could be enslaved in lieu of being put to death. Skin color had no causal relationship to slavery. Influential entrepreneurs and their connected cronies pushed the notion of white supremacy to justify the enslavement of black folks, and then used this racism post-slavery to create enmity between working-class whites and blacks as a means of maintaining a caste system. By tricking socially subordinate whites into feeling they belonged to the ruling caste, the moneyed elite divided the working class for easier exploitation, engineering a society where the rich always maintain control.

While it is true many of the founding fathers expressed disgust with the idea of slavery, most were racist, many owned slaves, and ultimately they all held hands with the wealthy merchants and plantation owners who would not see it abolished. Consider this passage from Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of The Declaration of Independence:

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another…”

Those words were slashed. The relatively enlightened minds like Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams caved-in to the fat cats. From the get-go, property rights — slaves — trumped human rights, and America thus entered into a great lie with itself at its birth. The nation that crowed to the world about the God-given rights of all men abducted and enslaved vulnerable black human beings from Africa to accumulate wealth.  Money’s triumph over liberty secured America’s inextricable connection to racism.  The poisonous notion of white supremacy was disseminated through schools, the pulpit, and the press. Black people were marginalized as barely human, or sub-human, and thus not entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The founding fathers sold out, then lied to themselves to justify their sin, then lied to their sons, and their sons lied to their sons… and America’s lie, that it is the sanctified nation of justice, liberty and opportunity for all, became its truth.

America’s history is, to echo Napoleon, a set of lies agreed upon.

***

Pappy called Martin Luther King a “goddamn communist nigger” one night in a drunken poker-game diatribe. This was in 1964, aboard his house boat, the Kon-Tiki,  with my father and my uncle Wesley, while I, nine-years-old, feigned sleep in my mildewy bunk, shocked and thrilled to hear these men, normally so staid and controlled, now outrageously rowdy and profane.

When Pappy said ‘nigger’ he said it the way white men of means have always said it — to project power and control, to reinforce and protect the order of things, delineate the lines, remind others just what the fucking deal was.

My maternal grandfather, Papa King, was a clown and a cad and openly racist. I learned this the month I spent with him in Anderson, South Carolina during the summer of 1969. “Listen,” he said to me one morning as we drove to the paint store. “I ain’t got a damn thing against niggers. I think everyone should own a few.”

Papa King belonged to the caste of men tricked into believing they were vested partners in the American dream because they were white, tricked into believing the reason they couldn’t rise above their bitter lives and live the dream was largely because they were being dragged down by blacks, when in fact they too were squashed by their white overseers above.

When Papa King said nigger, he said it to vent his undefined rage, to deflect his sense of his own ignorance and lowly status; thus he too used it to reinforce the order of things, to remind himself and those like him what the fucking deal was, but, sadly, the irony was lost to him.

***

Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time.

~ Frederick Douglass

America is a monument to racist social engineering. For black folks, freedom meant out of the frying pan and into the fire. In ‘The Case for Reparations’, Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us of historical reality:

“Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society.”[2]

Those roots remain today, wrapped around the neck of liberty like a policeman’s chokehold. America’s cultural genes are radioactive with racism. When white folks today assert the fallacious notion of social equilibrium, and from that conclude black folks are themselves responsible for being at the bottom of the societal barrel, they are saying blacks are inferior, and that is racism.

These toxic, pervasive misunderstandings are encouraged by an American history taught as an archetypal, idealized fairytale, glossing over the ugliness of class and racism with a distorted, whitewashed veneer of heroification and national narcissism. In ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’, James Loewen, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Vermont, writes:

“The superstructure of racism has long outlived the social structure of slavery that generated it.”[3] And: “It is all too easy to blame the victim and conclude that people of color are themselves responsible for being at the bottom. Without causal historical analysis, these racial disparities are impossible to explain.” [4]

Many Americans have then, in effect, been blocked from truth, purposefully rendered socially clueless. Every American child is, for example, taught the story of Hellen Keller in a way that fits perfectly into the storyline that America’s greatness results from the individual triumphing over great adversity, but not one word is mentioned regarding Keller’s life’s work of socialist activism.

This state of managed ignorance is then reinforced and protected by a firewall of myth. The fact so many people are oblivious to their own history and present day reality is testimony for just how effectively the lords of money have always managed the American myths: the myth of liberty, the myth of justice, the myth of exclusive righteousness, the myth of opportunity for all, the myth of a superior culture, the myth of a national covenant with God—all seamlessly woven into one supreme monolithic myth: America the Beautiful.

For America’s ruling elite, the bottom line will always be the dividing line. The natural order of things will always consist of the exploiters and the exploited, the manipulators and the manipulated. Exceptional black folks that do manage to make it to the promised land of wealth and status in America can bypass the decaying streets of towns like Ferguson, Missouri. Their children won’t suffer the caustic feelings of disempowerment, disconnection and humiliation so many black folks silently endure. Their sense of self won’t form ugly in segregated communities that afford little more opportunity than refugee camps. They won’t suffer salt rubbed into their life-wound like Michael Brown by white policemen who commute from affluent white communities to stalk the streets of poor black communities, and whose salaries are paid in part by the court costs and fines of the black folks they target.

The recent investigation of the Ferguson Police Department by the United States Justice Department in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting death at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson and the subsequent community protests and rioting revealed an ugly American reality:

“Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement both reflects and reinforces racial bias. The harms of Ferguson’s police and court practices are borne disproportionately by African Americans, and there is evidence that this is due in part to intentional discrimination on the basis of race… The city has been aware for years of concerns about the impact of its focus on revenue has had on lawful police action and the fair administration of justice in Ferguson. It has disregarded those concerns—even concerns raised from within City government — to avoid disturbing the court’s ability to optimize revenue generation.”

The fortunate black Americans who defy the odds and acquire wealth and status can dodge all that; they can escape the existential rendering W.E.B Dubois described as:

“…measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity… an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”[5]

Black men like Barack Obama or Clarence Thomas won’t wind up like Eric Gardner, killed by police on the streets of New York City for selling loose cigarettes — a misdemeanor deserving no more than a citation — but the truth remains that black Americans, especially men, will continue to be targeted by law enforcement. The truth remains America is the undisputed world king of incarceration —leading all nations in both the number of prisoners and in the rate of imprisoned citizens per population — and that the inmate population of its massive and increasingly privatized and profitable prison-industrial complex is both disproportionately black and Hispanic as well as overwhelmingly poor.

To protect its myth, its brand, America’s money-centric commanders have engineered a society where black wounds can never heal. Moreover, they will always deny the existence of any such wounds. The myth can never be compromised. The founding fathers were heroes. America has always been intrinsically beautiful. To waffle means to undermine the foundation of lies that support their thrones. In 1888, speaking on the predicament of black folks in America, Frederick Douglass told it like it was and still is:

“He is the victim of a cunningly devised swindle, one which paralyzes his energies, suppresses his ambition, and blasts all his hopes; and though he is nominally free he is actually a slave.”

This is an apt description for the so-called “War on Drugs,” which is actually a war on poor folks of color, especially blacks, and its goal is to perpetuate black Americans’ occupancy of the societal gutter.  In a recent interview with Laura Flanders on GRITtv, Noam Chomsky cut to the chase:

“… the whole drug war is designed, from policing to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for black men and, increasingly, women to be part of [American] society.”

Even though blacks as a group use drugs at similar rates as whites, they are arrested at triple the rate, and once arrested are ten times more likely to be convicted; one out of every three black males will be jailed or imprisoned in their lifetime. This felony disenfranchisement denies millions the right to vote, and provides a powerful obstacle to economic recovery and growth for black communities.

2013’s “Report of The Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee: Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System” concluded with this blistering indictment:

“For decades, the United States of America has employed mass incarceration as a convenient answer to inconvenient questions. In doing so, the U.S. government has glossed over the glaring racial inequalities that permeate every aspect of its criminal justice system. The government has both fostered and perpetuated those inequalities in clear violation of its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as other international agreements.

More importantly, however, the proliferation of racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system has a real impact on the lives of people of color living in the United States. Behind each statistic lies the face of a young black man whose potential has been cut short by a harsh prison sentence mandated by draconian drug laws. Behind each percentage point lies the face of a Latino child who will only know her parents through hurried, awkward visits in a prison visitation room. Behind each dataset lies a community of color bereft of hope because its young people have been locked away.

It is the human face — a face of color — of the racial injustice of the United States criminal justice system that is the most compelling reason for reform. It is time for the United States to take affirmative steps to eliminate the racial disparities in its criminal justice system.”

But don’t hold your breath.

“This is American history,” Chomsky concludes in his interview with Laura Flanders. “To break out of that is no small trick.”

***

We live in the age of a new brutalism marked not simply by an indifference to multiple social problems, but also defined by a kind of mad delight in the spectacle and exercise of violence and cruelty. The United States is sullied by a brutalism that is perfectly consistent with a new kind of barbaric power, one that puts millions of people in prison, subjects an entire generation to a form of indentured citizenship, and strips people of the material and symbolic resources they need to exercise their capacity to live with dignity and justice.”

~ Henry A. Giroux

America the Brutalful doesn’t require much of an actual government. The colossal, most lethal military money can buy to wage wars on foreign soil for profit and a militarized police force to suppress internal dissent and manage the world’s biggest prison system are all that is required. The executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government serve solely as the choir to the corporate preacher.

In his book ‘Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism’, the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes:

“The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributing elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.” [6]

Democracy Incorporated is the near-complete realization of an America the German economist Werner Sombart called in 1906, “the Canaan of capitalism, its promised land.”[7] What has always been the goal of the rich white elite — a promised land for the wealthy, free of government intrusion, where all things, particularly the vulnerable, can and therefore should be exploited, is essentially here.

The loose ends are being tied. Monumental social reforms of the  1960s and 70s have been  eroded by  recent Supreme Court rulings.  In its 2013 Alabama v. Holder ruling, the Court essentially nullified the Voting Rights Act of 1965, granting a green light for states to enact laws that will likely reduce minority voter participation. 2014’s Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action  decision siding with the state of Michigan, which banned its colleges and universities from using race and gender as part of their admissions protocols, effectively disaffirmed affirmative action, leaving diversity in the hands of administrators.  The 2010 Citizens United decision administered a lethal injection to any notion of campaign finance reform, opening the floodgates of corporate money to gush into the election process.  The Schuette  v. Coalition decision in particular parallels the national systematic transformation of higher education from institutions promoting a diversity of ideas, a vital function for a living democracy, to corporate prep factories. This Wal-Martification of higher education constructs dams across the flowing rivers of fresh ideas, creating stagnant reservoirs of the status quo. Professors are increasingly losing academic influence to administrators, stripping the soul from pedagogy.

In 1969, nearly 80% of public college and university faculty were tenure-track positions. By 2009 that number had plummeted to 33.5%. This new American academic labor system has radically reduced full-time, tenure-tracked faculty in favor of non-tenure-tracked employees known as adjunct or contingent faculty, who, like Wal-Mart workers, are mostly part-time. 51% of these part-time public college and university instructors receive no benefits. The majority of both full-time and part-time contingent faculty receive no long term commitment from their institutions and have no involvement in curriculum planning or faculty meetings.

In a 2014 essay, Henry Giroux, critical pedagogy theorist and author of ‘The University in Chains’ and ‘Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education’, wrote:

“What might it mean to define the university as a public good and democratic sphere rather than as an institution that has aligned itself with market values and is more attentive to market fluctuations and investor interests than educating students to be critically engaged citizens?”

The dogs are close to running leash-free now. The whole abominable mess virtually runs on cultural autopilot. People are increasingly blind to their own plight. Wealthy box store shareholders leave their luxury automobiles with valets at the opera, while the employees that work those stores struggle to keep their rust buckets on the road. Folks are progressively unable to recognize causal relationships or question authority. The American myth has blocked their ability to form a social or world consciousness. Their corporate commanders have inoculated them against any vestige of moral responsibility for the carnage America wreaks in the world. When the Senate recently issued its damning report on the CIA’s widespread and enthusiastic use of torture, there were few days of modest public uproar…and then the whole issue of torture, a matter that should trigger thunderous outrage and demand for reform and accountability, was swept away by a tsunami of pop-news bullshit.

It is the myth of America the Beautiful that remains up front, burned into the minds of the managed like a cattle brand. The masters just press the usual buttons to keep truth flying high above their heads like a stealth bomber on a covert mission of death and destruction.

Think about the Great Recession of 2007-09, which came down after Wall Street rolled snake-eyes with America’s money, causing millions to lose their jobs, their savings, and their homes. Meanwhile, the financial barons actually consolidated and strengthened their power by doing what they do so well: skillfully manipulating a purposefully confused society. Through their political lapdogs and their privately-owned propaganda industry, they manufactured cultural focal points of fear and insecurity, circling the wagons around the myth, diverting folks from reality, tricking them into believing America’s predicament resulted from drug-dealing, job-stealing brown people from Mexico, godless brown-skinned terrorists from the Middle East, an internal culture of unpatriotic liberals enabling lazy black folks, and corrupt labor unions demanding outrageous benefits and pensions for their coddled members, robbing opportunity from good, hard-working Americans.

America’s beautiful face is a conglomerate, a skin of managed myths. Peel it back and the beautiful is revealed as the brutal. The public cheers elicited by the mere mention of troops or wounded warriors are as unconscious a response as frog legs twitching in a frying pan. Nobody dares ask what the wounded are wounded for, and certainly no one challenges their neighbor to express feelings for the men, women and children America wounded or killed. The same aircraft that blow folks to pieces as “collateral damage” in the exploitation of vulnerable societies’ resources fly in glorious formation over American sports stadiums, where misty-eyed crowds place hands over hearts in collective worship of a heartless America. Any military spectacle is treated as if it were an extension of Jesus himself.

No one asks why. Too few think about it.

 ***

“What I am saying today is… ‘America you must be born again!'”[8]

~ Martin Luther King

I was born in an American town that lynched an elephant and burned a black man’s bullet-riddled corpse for public spectacle. I was literally born into the hands of my grandfather, Pappy, who pulled me into the light from my mother’s womb, and who caused that light to dim when he called Martin Luther King a goddamn communist nigger in my presence as a child.

Martin Luther King was not a communist; he was a socialist. He understood that America was engineered to be racist for profit; moreover, he understood the engineers could not stop, that they would be required by their insatiable, hubristic gluttony to manipulate the very world for their personal gain. He knew the planet was their game board. He would understand that al-Qaeda and ISIS were created by America’s sabotaging of Middle Eastern societies in order to secure their choke-hold on the oil fields. He knew how the engineers rolled. In a speech delivered to the 1967 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he proclaimed:

“Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated. “[9]

His focus had shifted to populist economic reform. On November 14, 1966, he warned his staff that when you go after capitalism “you are really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry.” He began organizing the Poor People’s Campaign to win economic justice for the nation’s poor. He planned to bring caravans of poor folks of all races to Washington D.C. and camp them at the National Mall to bring attention to poverty. He called for an Economic Bill of Rights, a guaranteed wage, full employment, an end to the Vietnam War and a massive government investment in the ghettos.

On March 29, 1968, a week before he planned to march with striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, he declared: “This is not a race war; it is now a class war.”[10]

Six day later he was murdered.

Martin Luther King was a great American. The eternal testimony to his greatness can be found in the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, written in April, 1963 from the pit of America the Brutalful in response to a letter titled ‘A Call for Unity’, penned by eight prominent white southern clergymen and published in The Birmingham News.  ‘A Call for Unity’ was really a call for the brutal status quo of American apartheid; it was the frocked, robed echo of hate.

‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ is one of the most important documents ever written, not just as it relates to American history, but to the story of the world itself, because it demonstrates how beautiful, how strong and courageous and forgiving and loving a human being can be. The words radiate a higher form of consciousness that describes Martin Luther King’s remarkable character; they resonate as if written by an emissary from a cosmological civilization trying to point cavemen towards enlightenment. ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ serves as both a mirror reflecting our brutal past and present, and as a light illuminating the path forward.

Forward. I cannot travel back and lead Pappy into the light of Martin Luther King’s mind, even though it shines forever as bright as a quasar. I cannot go back and free Papa King from the chains of his managed ignorance.  As long as I live, however, I will stand free in that light for both. But make no mistake, America today is managed by men who think like Pappy. Beneath them are millions of the managed like Papa King.

America will forever be racist, xenophobic, and menacing to all things exploitable as long as it is owned and operated by a money-grubbing gang of global godfathers. The godfathers must be pointed towards enlightenment. Or pushed. Truly enlightened minds cannot place profit over people, nor can they exploit the vulnerable. Enlightened minds cannot engineer societies deaf to the cries of human need and suffering, nor torture the world in pursuit of wealth and power.

Martin Luther King had a vision of something better he often referred to as “The Beloved Community,” described so beautifully on The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change website:

“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”

I don’t stand alone in the light. There are good folks all over America that welcome its radiance.  There are plenty of good folks all over this tiny planet who believe the Beloved Community would be a beautiful thing, who believe we should live lives prepping for a better future instead of doomsday, and who imagine a world where people take precedence over profit, and where cultures coexist and evolve together freely through the transmuting energy of love.

May freedom one day ring for all.

Kent Monroe lives in Troy, New Hampshire with his girlfriend and a gang of motley cats and dogs. He prefers to write and garden, but must work when he can to feed the gang. He believes people should smile as often as possible. He frequently contributes to The Missing Slate.

 

[1] Eric Williams, “Capitalism and Slavery” (The University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 19.

[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”, The Atlantic, June 2014.

[3] James Loewen, “Lies My Teacher Told Me” (Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 144.

[4] James Loewen, op. cit. (Simon and Schuster,2007), p. 171.

[5] W.E.B. Dubois, “The Souls of Black Folks,” Chapter 1, p.3.

[6] Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,” (Princeton University Press, 2008), 284.

[7] Werner Sombart, “Why is There No Socialism in the United States?” Translated by Patricia M. Hocking and C.T. Husbands (M.E. Sharpe, 1976), 3.

[8] From the speech “Where Do We Go From Here?” delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention

Atlanta, Ga., 16 August 1967

[9] From the speech “Where Do We Go From Here?” delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention

Atlanta, Ga., August 1967

[10] Coretta Scott King, “My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 312.