We were reading Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Since this was a freshman-level course, students were asked to pay attention to the imagery. Specifically, what in the novel has the author designated to represent "black clouds," for instance, or "white hot flames." Or a figure of "whiteness." A warning of sorts!
Knitters have been divided by events in the community over the last couple of months. Soon after the #Ravelry stand against Trump and white supremacy, a woman in the knitting community was attacked at a yarn festival by a man who does not support Ravelry'
(Image by Beatie from flickr) Details DMCA
Perhaps I should have informed the students about Poe, born in 1809, during the enslavement of descendants of Africans and a pro-slavery advocate after they read the novel. Perhaps I should have waited to see if the mostly American students would have been awakened to something hovering in the back of their minds. Something they already had knowledge about, whether or not understood what it all meant.
At any rate, I drew the students' attention to the end of the narrative, to a native figure, described by Poe as bigger than life. Did I mention Poe was an active pro-slavery advocate? The figure seems to be blocking the path of the white adventures who had landed on this all-black island. While the terrified men try to escape the island and its rebellious native population, they notice how the figure, once dark, presented itself as a "hue of the skin... a perfect whiteness of snow."
The image struck me as reminiscent of William Faulkner's 1929 novel, Sanctuary, in which the violence of an angry mob of white men attacks a white man, described by the residents Jefferson as a dark man-- a description that will justify his lynching.
I hear a voice from the back of the classroom. I see the one and only black male student standing, yelling something at me while grabbing his coat and his book bag. He said I was wrong. Wrong! Why did I think the white flames had anything to do with racism?
I never mentioned racism !
It's the 1980s, the Reagan years, so I was "tiptoeing", similar to teachers and professors today, facing anti-blackness sentiments and a mis-characterization of Critical Race Theory and "Wokeness". The class consists mainly of white students. While I anticipated the response of students pausing to confront these images they've seen all their lives, since most would have been educated to believe in American exceptionalism, I didn't anticipate the response of black students, also educated to believe the same set of myths about American innocence.
But it's never to late to add layers to what we know.
***
Cultural erasure is genocide, writes Professor of Philosophy, Jason Stanley, in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. It's what happens when we are told that we don't know anything. Really. We don't see what we've seen all our lives. We don't understand what we thought we did for so long. Other people tells us how wrong we've been to think we are even human and have the right to think and be creative.
It has been that way, Stanley explains, since Western colonial powers invaded indigenous people around the global. Consider North America, where whites ignored the songs and stories of indigenous peoples, songs and stories, he writes, that were "infused with the past, their complicated land access systems, their social and political structures, their spiritual traditions and kinship rites". All that these indigenous people have known and the traditions they have practiced, Stanley adds, "are just as intricately human as Europe's cultural and social practices". Nonetheless, colonizers have felt justified in furthering their power, labeling their behavior as necessary to right a savage people.
Writing his dissertation in Kenya, focusing on "the first generation of Western-educated Kikuyu", Stanley's father specifically focused on those students educated "in British schools in Kenya and Uganda". And did so their entire lives.
In Europe, Stanley's father lived under Nazi rule in Germany. As a child in the fascist educational system, he quickly understood what was represented by those cultural images of "dark" and "light," for example. As an adult, Stanley's father "saw how the Nazi fascists and the British colonialists shared certain sensibilities and impulses".
As Stanley writes, his father concluded that a link between colonialists and fascists existed because, for both, it was necessary to sustain the myth of superiority of the colonialists by dehumanizing the colonized, resulting inevitably in the genocide of the colonized, if not their culture.
The students in Kenya "received a British education". They were "taught the Christian Bible, studied European monarchies, and read the classics of English Literature", while, to study traditional Kikuyu religion, was dangerous. Anyone who did so was thought to be "a potential rebel". And could be incarcerated or killed. In Germany, Stanley's father learned that Germany had been wronged by the victors of WW I. Consequently, everything Germany did was justified because the country needed "to reclaim Germany's lost colonialism". Germany was exceptional !
As Stanley continues in Erasing History, the enslaved African, kidnapped and brought to the 13 Colonies, understood and spoke a number of languages, but it was necessary for all to learn to respect the Bible and the word of God. It was the same for the indigenous, brought by force to boarding schools, and became, as Stanley explains, "vehicles by which colonizers bring civilization to the colonized, in order to free them from their 'savagism'".
The core of civilization, Christianity offered the West a hierarchical ordering of human beings. There's God and then the white race. I think about Trump and his peddling a "bible" that has "Trump" right under God! Minus Trump, Western civilization's message, writes Stanley, was simple: "'Christian nations are the greatest, Christian civilization is the greatest, we must carry to them [the uncivilized] Christian knowledge, Christian example, and Christian civilization'".
It's no wonder that in due time, a generation of oppressed capitulate, becoming co-conspirators, gatekeepers, collaborators. I've encountered quite a few who believe themselves cleansed of their history as conquered or enslaved people . Indigenous children, writes Stanley, taken to boarding schools, far from their homes and families, learned from a system with a "perverse sense of religious superiority". If they learned to ascend the ladder of civilization, that is, as Stanley explains, "'sever all ties with the past'" and reject their "aversion to manual labor", they would be ideal indigenous individuals.
Most of all, model indigenous individuals would be "productive" clogs in a capitalist system. And "productive" for Master doesn't make for free individuals.
As a Kenyan who grew up under British colonialism, the author of fiction and non-fiction essays, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, writes Stanley, understood that the British educational system produced Kenyan "loyalist collaborators". These "collaborators" had been children who came to never question and accept "the ideology they were taught".
Respect God and respect the labor model is what W. E. B. Du Bois noted, writes Stanley, as necessary for the continuation of enslavement. Free the mind of the enslaved of any knowledge of resistance, then all that is left is the robbing of the body of autonomy.
Du Bois, explains Stanley, saw this form of invasion and conquest white supremacy. You can almost see the image again of the larger-than-life figure of whiteness, can't you? All the knowledge about the right of any human being to protest the tyranny of fascism is replaced by the knowledge necessary to control a whole population of the Other.
I think of the taunting and beating of Tyre Nichols by black police officers. They let him die once done with beating him. He was bleeding. For these officers, trained by a system that honors hierarchical power, Nichols was black and, therefore, dehumanized.
It is this violence that is whiteness blocking the pathway to true freedom.
***
The Mizahi, are Jews, writes Stanley, indigenous to the region. European Jews on the other hand are Ashkenazi, who later regarded their mission in Palestine as a "colonial project."
The Nakba was real. The forcible exodus of Palestinians from their homelands-- also real. It was, as Stanley writes, an event that "brought ruin and destruction on hundreds of settlements". And yet, the colonial narrative is that the land was uninhabited. Palestine was written up as "a washed and deserted land." "To promote this myth," Stanley adds, "Israeli forces drove many of the land's inhabitants out, then destroyed and removed their villages, which numbered well over four hundred, according to some estimates." And what's was called "Judaization" continues today. The process is genocidal in that it "dehumanizes the previous occupants of the land" and then "simply erases their presence".
In place of the Palestinians is a myth of Western and Israeli innocence. Stanley points to the targeting of bombs (US-made) that have destroyed "Gaza's educational infrastructure". He continues, "the assaults on universities in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as serious harassment and attacks on senior faculty and students supporting Palestine within Israeli university system," constitutes "scholasticide".
It's all part of a nationalist project meant to erase the idea that there was ever a Palestine. And the genocide of Palestinian people... well, look at the bloodied and mangled bodies, particularly of babies and school-aged children.
Such a project shouldn't be considered democratic!
A nationalist project, Stanley argues, includes the replacement of liberal educational institutions with ones that are fascist in nature. There's a nationalism at the core of agendas in which "supremacist nationalism" employs "a universalist" form and relies on the "civilization savagism paradigm".
But not all colonial nationalism, writes Stanley, is to be opposed. To be anti-colonial is to oppose colonial nationalism, and the Mau Mau rebellion, he explains, was an anti-colonial project, calling on Kenyans to remember their past and traditions and reject the colonial enterprises.
In a supremacist nationalism project such as the ones in Texas or Florida and many other states, writes Stanley, the fight "against academic efforts to cover the full story of the country's history" is on, waged by fascist-mind Americans. But there is a memory of resistance emerging. While American exceptionalism is a narrative claiming America's origins in innocence, and while there is an erasure of "both the central role that slavery played in shaping the country's economy and the vast genocide of indigenous people", there is also resistance.
Writes Stanley: "the myths of supremacist nationalism have... a specific structure, one that represents the nation as greater than its neighbors, and its national sins". In supremacist nationalism, he argues, is the basis for fascism.
But there is and always has been resistance to fascism. It's just a question of educating ourselves about our history!
It is up to those of us not bent on seeing America under fascist rule for generations to come, writes Stanley, "to define a different version of America, one that is conducive to democracy and human flourishing and that justifies a role in the world as an example, not a warning".
