Ostensibly it started with the death of George Floyd on May 25.
Floyd was arrested by police
officers for allegedly using a counterfeit $20.00 bill for the purchase of a
pack of cigarettes. The encounter started off when store clerks, two very
young men, one African American and one Asian American (I think) discovered
what they thought was an illegal use of counterfeit cash and walked across the
street to confront Floyd and a companion, who remained parked across the
street. They wanted the cigarettes back but had no luck, so they went back to
the store and called it in as a theft. They also reported Floyd as trunk
and not in control of himself. Floyd, originally from Houston, Texas, was
a very large man who at age 46 was a recently laid off bouncer.
Police shortly arrived and when
they did, one of them pulled his sidearm for some reason and ordered Floyd to
place his hands on the steering wheel of his car. He shortly re-holstered
the sidearm but then pulled Floyd from the car, which was filmed by a man who
was sitting in his car immediately behind Floyd's (something that frankly would
have entailed some risk to that person under the circumstances). That
person soon left, or was made to move.
At that point, however things
seemed to be in control. Footage of Floyd shows that he probably was drunk and
was very distressed. Officers had no problem in leading the stumbling
Floyd up to the wall of the Chinese restaurant where they sat him down without
incident. They then moved him to their police car across the street where he
stumbled and fell right as a second police car arrived. By that time,
Floyd was complaining of being claustrophobic and not wanting to enter the
police car.
As this occurred, the third
police vehicle arrived. That one was carrying officer Derek Chauvin and officer
Tou Thao.
Before we move on, we should
say something about these officers as this entire matter has descended into a
type of racial confrontation. Thoa is obviously Asian American.
More particularly, however, his is Hmong by ethnicity, although American
born. The Hmong are an Asian people who began a southward migration after
the Battle of Zhuolu in 2500 BC. They kept moving south into Southeast Asia up
into modern times when, as a result of the Vietnam War, they entered the United
States as refugees. They've located, as refugees, in the upper Midwest
where, like is typical for many immigrant groups in the first generation of migration,
they've been associated with gang activity.** Thao had six
complaints that had been previously been lodged against him and one lawsuit for
brutality. I'm not making any assumptions on any of this, as I really
know nothing other than what I've read. Mostly, because the Hmong are on
an American integration track that African Americans have been slow to benefit
from, its interesting for that reason. We'll discuss that more below.
The focus of so much attention,
Derek Chauvin, had previously been involved in seventeen complaints and three
shootings, one of which was fatal. Again, I don't know anything about any of
this, so I'm not commenting on it.
Chauvin became involved in the
effort to get Floyd into the car and, for some reason, ended up pulling him out
of the car while Thao watched. Three officers actually held Floyd down,
who was obviously completed incapacitated at this time. Chauvin had his
knee on Floyd's neck, and Chauvin was also a large man. Floyd begins to
complain he can't breath and this goes on for a long time. At least one
woman from the gathering crowed attempts to intervene, with another warning her
that hte policemen have mace.
The whole thing is shocking.
I just watched this for the
first time when I started to type this out, which is June 1, 2020. Living
a long way from Minneapolis, and coming at a time when I was largely absent
from the news, it wasn't something I was up on at the time.
We should be frankly, the
rioting is basically of three characters, one is an expression of rage, one is
an expression of virtue signaling, and the third is opportunism.
Protesting, as opposed to rioting, is likewise of three characters, those being
rage, support, and virtue signaling. I suppose there may been an
opportunistic element to it as well.
We're not going to attempt to
condone rioting violence as some have done. Violence is violence and we
don't condone it. We don't condone violence of any kind except in self
defense, although on that we take a broad view. Not so broad of view,
however, that we license the use of it in some ways that a lot of Americans
typically do. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example,
receive no sanction here. They were murders. They were murders that have
nothing to do with this story, but we note that as we want to make clear where
we're coming from.
And with that, we'll now skip
the riots themselves in terms of what's occurring, for the time being.
The rage expressed is a latent
rage over the American failure to deal with the byproducts of a unique form of
racism that commenced 400 years ago last year with the introduction
of slavery into the New World.
Slavery wasn't new, of course,
as some like to point out, but quite frankly race based slavery was new and in1619 when it was introduced into the New World it was a reintroduction of
it. Slavery had gone away in the intervening years following the collapse
of the Roman Empire. It hadn't gone way all at once. The Saxons,
for example, still held slaves when the Normans invaded England in 1066,
something the Normans were horrified by. But by and large, and well prior
to 1066, slavery had left Europe.
It had left due to
Christianity, contrary to the snarky "the Bible sanctions slavery"
comments sometimes made by the historically and religiously ignorant. In
fact, the Bible never sanctioned slavery and the mentions of it with
specificity in the Old Testament were restraints on it, with slavery having
been a nearly universally practiced "institution" in the world at
that time. Unlike other peoples, the Jews were strictly enjoined on what
they could and could not do with slaves in an era in which slaves and servants
were so synonymous that the word for them was the same. As that would
indicate, most slaves at that time fit into a fine distinction between being
really bonded and being held as servants and were of the same ethnicity,
usually, in the case of the Jews, as those who held them. This wasn't
always the case, of course. Hagar, for example, was Egyptian.
The other type of slavery was
around at the time to be sure, and the Jews were of course taken into slavery
en masse more than once. That sort of slavery, however, was pretty much
enjoined by the Bible in regards to the Jews. An exception can be found
in the instance of the wives of enemy warriors killed in battle, but the
example proves the rule. The taking of enemy women was the norm in the
world at the time, but in the Jewish instance those taken had to be married to
their captor who was subject to such a set of requirements as to the widow that
only the most smitten would every have bothered to attempt it, including
allowing the unfortunate woman to mourn for the loss of her first husband.
In early Christian times,
therefore, the institution was clearly on the way out, something that is
probably exemplified by the examples you can find of early Christian saints in
which you can find two members of the same household, one bound and one free,
both going into martyrdom together, with in one instance three such people
going to their deaths, a woman, her slave, and an infant, all together.
Those instances indicate the evolution of slaves into servants, which is not to
say that slaves resulting from wars and put to hard labor were also not common
at the time. By the Middle Ages, however, it was very uncommon in
Christendom. Indeed, by that time it was the province of the Vikings, who
took slaves in raids, which was one of the reasons they were regarded with
horror, and of the Islamic Arabs, who developed slave raiding into an economic
enterprise.
It's there that we circle back
around to the horror story of American racism, as the Islamic Arabs were
distinctly different than Christians in this regard. Christians looked
down on bondage in general and in the case of sex regarded, and still regard,
sex between unmarried couples as completely illicit. Indeed, Christians
regarded from the very first instance that marriage required the full consent
of both parties, man and woman, or no valid marriage existed. Muslims,
however, didn't regard this to be the case in the same way. Marriage, in
Islam, required consent, but Mohammed had licensed forced sex with slave women
during his rise and this resulted in a slave industry in Muslim lands that was
based on labor, as slavery was sanctioned, and on sex. By Christian terms
this involved, of course, rape, but in Muslim terms, it did not.
The Arabs therefore developed
an extensive slave trading enterprise based on the capture of slaves, for labor
and forced sex. It spread throughout northern Africa but it also spread
to the Mediterranean and even the Atlantic as Arab raiders took human prizes
for those purposes. The only real requirement was that they couldn't take
Muslim prisoners and Arab men, and of course it was limited to men, couldn't
hold Muslim women as sex slaves. Holding Irish women, for example, or
holding black African women who were not Muslim, was perfectly allowable.
By the time the Portuguese
started colonizing the West African coast an extensive slave trade, based on a
person's religious affiliation, was going on, and fueled in part by the evil of
war. Slaves were often captured locally and, and often in war, and then
traded to Arab slave traders, who sold them on in other places, often in their
own domains. The Portuguese stepped into this evil and joined right in, in
spite of their Christian background. Hence the exportation of slaves to
the New World commenced.
The reintroduction of slavery
was notably concentrated by Europeans in their new domains, although it was not
actually limited to it. Still, the avoidance of reintroducing the evil in their
native lands was no doubt in part because it was an obvious evil that would
have called into question the fundamental nature of those societies and what
they claimed to be about.
By that time Europeans were
involved in a wholescale global colonial effort. We're not going to go
into that in depth and we're not going to get preachy about that, as is so
often the case on this topic. Yes, Europeans were attempting to extend their
rule over foreign people's everywhere, but in fact everyone everywhere was also
attempting to do that. While nationalism as we understand it, contrary to the
common historical assertion, has always existed, in the 17th Century it was
also commonly accepted that one sovereign could rule over a wide group of
peoples and no nation thought much about extending its power over the weaker
nations, including for economic reasons. Nothing in that excuses slavery,
but if we are going to step back and also condemn colonialism in the period
we'll be in the position of condemning people for something that they would not
have grasped as wrong. Indeed, one feature of European colonial extension
into other areas of the globe is that their colonial enterprises sometimes
ended up smacking up against those of the people they were attempting to
colonize, making their contests ones of one empire against another.
If people, globally, of the day
would not have thought of colonialism as being wrong, they knew better about
slavery. Indeed, in order to engage in it, they had to rationalize it.
That hadn't been the case with
slavery of antiquity. This is not to say that such slavery was nice in
any fashion, but the thin resources of the day gave it an economic nature that
was distinctly different from later eras. As noted above, the distinction
between conventional slaves and servants had been slight, and as an important
feature of that, they were usually of the same culture. The exception was
for what essentially amounted to prisoners of war, for whom there was no other
easy way to hold them. It's important to note, however that there were
exceptions that were ethnicity based, as when entire peoples were carried into
slavery.
That hadn't occurred for
millenai in European terms and therefore the reintroduction of slavery was not
only new, it was uniquely malignant. It was based on ethnicity, which
came to be seen rapidly as based on "race". The thin excuse was a
gradient from African slaves being very primitive people in the eyes of
Europeans who would somehow benefit from their captivity to their just being
inferior or even sort of subhuman.
It's that categorization that
lives on with us today in the form of a racism and economic legacy that has
kept African Americans from sharing the story of other immigrants to North
America. Only Indians somewhat otherwise share that story, although
theirs is uniquely different in some ways.
Racism justified keeping blacks
as slaves and economics fueled it, making it a doubly sinful enterprise based
on failing to love your neighbor and loving money over all else. That
evil was recognized as such well before the American Revolution and in fact
slavery was passing away in the north by that time. At the time of the country
declaring its independence from England it was expected that slavery would pass
away in the south as well, but economics kept that from occurring, placing the
overwhelming bulk of American blacks in unending bondage. A growing
realization of the evil of slavery resulted in the Civil War (there was no
other cause but that in spite of what Confederate apologist may maintain
today), and to the nation's credit thousands died to free the slaves. Thousands
also died in a disreputable and evil effort to keep their fellow men slaves as
well, of course.
Following the Civil War
economics eventually triumphed over justice and an early effort to appropriate
lands from slaveholders and issue them back out to former slaves on a 40 acre
standard American farming model failed. Soon the nation turned its back
on the former slaves figuring it had done enough just to free them. In
the early 20th Century blacks began to abandon the south in the Great Migration
and spread throughout the country in an effort to improve their lot, but the
south remained the locality where the black population was the highest and most
deprived. It wasn't until World War One when there were serious efforts
to address the ongoing discrimination and poverty of African Americans and
blacks enlisting in the US armed forces at the time thought of their services
as a full step into equality, which it proved not to be. It was the introduction,
however that even the Red
Summer of 1919 couldn't reverse. It would have been logical if
World War Two would have built on what came before in the 1910s and 1920s, and
it did in some ways, but it wasn't until the Truman Administration that the
ongoing legal institutions that kept blacks impoverished and separate began to
come rapidly down.
From 1948 through the early
1970s the Federal Government worked diligently to dismantle the laws that
burdened blacks, aided by a United States Supreme Court that made use of
Reconstruction Era laws for the first time in a century. But, significant
to our story here, it's important to realize that blacks in the south did not
achieve legal equality until well within the lifetimes of the current President
and his Democratic contender. For that matter, slavery's passing was not
even a century old at the time of their births. Put another way, more
time has passed between World War One and today than between the births of Joe
Biden and Donald Trump and the end of slavery. There were men and women
still alive who had been born into slavery when they were born (and when I was
born).
The burden of slavery would be
hard to overcome in just a century's time but the legal institutions that were
erected in the south after the failure of Reconstruction created a near slavery
sort of economic status for blacks, dooming them to certain types of work and
poor educations. Those conditions fueled the Great Migration but they also
meant that the majority of blacks lived their entire lives in deprived
conditions. This only began to change for those remaining in the south in the
1940s and it really got rolling in the 1960s. This means that most
of the improvement in the economic lives of blacks has only come since World
War Two, and the strong prejudices that allowed that to be the case lived on
openly well into the 1970s. That's not long ago. It effectively
means that George Floyd was born in an era when expressing prejudice of that
type was acceptable in the region in which he was born.
The Civil Rights era of the
1960s is looked back as the golden era, in some ways of civil rights efforts
for African Americans. It's easy to forget that there was widespread
opposition to the efforts and openly opposing them was not socially
unacceptable. Lyndon
Johnson went to the dedication of Stone Mountain in 1970, for example, an
event honoring Confederate leadership in a fashion that would never be condoned
today. The situation for blacks has improved massively since 1970.
But as is often the case, the
law of unintended consequences has plagued them as well. The elimination
of legal barriers raised the fortunes of all African Americans but it improved
the lives of middle class and nearly middle class blacks the most, who migrated
out of the ghettos where they had been previously concentrated. That pattern followed
that laid out by all prior American immigrant minorities. It had the
accidental consequence of concentrating poverty in those same areas, whereas
prior to that there had been a range of economic classes in them. Farming policies of the Great Depression wiped out black farming in the south duringthe 1930s, eliminating a long standing black class there. Experimental
liberal social policies in the 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed efforts towards a
Universal Basic Income and had predictable and disastrous effects of the
African American poor whose social structures were weak due to the legacy of
slavery.***This had the impact of concentrating poverty further.
It also meant that blacks
didn't universally follow the path of prior immigrant groups, something that
was further the case due to ongoing racism. Prior groups had generally
reached a day in which wholescale migration over to the middle class occured
and the ethnic character of the group started to dissolve.
People may claim to be Irish
Americans or Italian Americans today, for example, without even grasping what
that meant a century ago. In 1920, if a person was an Irish American,
nearly everything about them culturally and economically was made obvious just
by stating that status. Today it may mean nothing more than a person having
corned beef on St. Patrick's Day. As that status changed in the country
it meant not only that people moved economically up, but it also meant that
they moved into other groups, regions, and ethnicities. People claiming,
for example, to be Italian Americans today are nearly as likely to be descended
from English immigrants than Italian ones, due to marriages outside of the
declared ethnicity.
All of this is much less true
for African Americans. The absurd "one drop" rule means that
children of mixed unions are regarded as black, which is nothing more than
pigmentation in biological terms. Mix marriages and other unions have
only become common very, very recently.
They have now become common,
however, which is a signal that, in spite of what we're now enduring, we may actually
be at that moment at which African Americans finally cross over to just being
Americans. Within the last few years advertising, a mirror reflected back
on American beliefs, has gone from introducing black actors in advertisements
to mixed couples. This is now common and hardly anyone notices. As
recently as a decade ago this would have sparked some controversy and in the
1970s it would have cost the advertiser revenue. The fact that television
viewers think nothing of a white husband and a black wife, or vice versa, is
really revolutionary.
As is, of course, the fact that
we've had a black President.
The Civil Rights effort of the
1960s was reflected back on the country in strife in the 1970s. If we
think of the south resisting integration in the 1960s we're recalling that
correctly, but we're also forgetting that Dixiecrats and the like were really a
thing of the 1970s. Southern Rock bands started flying the Stars and Bars
in that decade, not before, and when Lynrd Skynrd sang about Wallace in Sweet
Home Alabama, it was 1974. That song remains popular today without
anyone seemingly pausing to think that it was a "we'll get around to
it" reaction to Southern Man. Given that, the massive
reaction to Barack Obama during his presidency is perhaps not too surprising,
as for some there was a racist element to that reaction (but certainly not one
on the party of everyone who disliked him as President). That some of
that remains during the Presidency of Donald Trump is accordingly not
surprising.
None of which means that the
nation should just sit on its hands as everything is going to be okay.
There remain real problems for black Americans, and Indian Americans, that
other people don't face. Part of that is racism, but part of that is
poverty which in turn allows the racism to continue. Racist find support for
their racism in the fact that blacks remain poor and their social institutions
were so badly damaged by well-meaning but poorly thought out programs form the
1960s. And that's a problem the nation can't ignore.
Much of that problem is simply
economic, and curing the economic problem would cure a lot of ills. But
the nation has not only failed to address the economic problems of African
Americans, and Indians, its worked to make them much worse. Entering into
the work place and rising up remains a problem for poor blacks who are
concentrated by location, and who face stout competition from high immigrant
populations that have strong social cohesion and who face less prejudice.
They are well aware of that.
And they're also likely to know
that these problems are deeply ingrained and are going to be ignored. The
Democratic Party, which claims the support of most blacks, is unlikely to do
anything in real terms to aid them and has turned its attention instead to new
immigrant populations which it feels are more likely to provide its base,
rightly or wrongly, in the future. To say that the Democrats have no
interest in rural blacks would be an understatement, but it also has little
interest in doing anything concrete for urban blacks either. Indeed,
since the 2000s the Democratic Party has often taken positions that are
offensive to the views of the majority of African Americans and taken the view
that blacks had to support them as blacks have nowhere else to go. And they do
largely have nowhere else to go as the GOP has had no concrete position towards
blacks since the 1980s.
And so the rage is
understandable.
Unfortunately, it is not likely
to be helpful to anyone. Riots of the 1960s gave rise to the "law
and order" campaign of Richard Nixon, something not regarded as a bright
spot in the nation's history now. And the co-opting of genuine movements
in the 1960s by the hardcore left brought them disrepute in later years.
Indeed, it can be argued that hardcore left insertion in the movements of the
left, something that has never really stopped, doomed their effectiveness and
further brought to an end the active Civil Rights movement of the 60s.
Put another way, while the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abby
Hoffman are obvious to anyone who is paying attention, a lot of people just
aren't paying attention.
And that seems to be sort of
rapidly playing out now. A lot of the protesters we see at events now are
likely not really motivated by the plight of African Americans so much as they
are something else, somethings innocent, somethings opportunistic, and
somethings radical. And amazingly at the same time we have a President
who seems to be fanning the flames by his statements.
And so we can wonder what will
occur. What probably won't occur, no matter what, is a Richard Stroud
like program designed to specifically aid the economic progress of African
Americans, nor any attention to repairing the damage to black social
institutions that were destroyed by the programs of the 1960s and 1970s.
Democrats have no real interest in taking that on, and Republicans aren't
likely to be specifically focused on doing so.
________________________________________________________________________
*This refers to a series of
1969 protests, but the title seemed applicable here.
**The movie Gran Torino may
have brought the urban American Hmong into familiarity with Americans as a
group.
On gang activity, almost every
post mid-19th Century American immigrant ethnicity has had gang activity in its
early stages. An exception may exist for Japanese and Korean immigrants, but that
would be pretty much it. After the cultures begin to rise, with police
work a typical early introduction into the middle class, this almost always
fades away. Irish, Italian, Jewish, among other, ethnicities have all
been associated with criminal gangs at one point.
***African American social
structures were deeply impacted by the fact that for the first 300 years of
their presence in North America a black slave could be sold at any time.
Therefore, much of what other people regard as permanent was not equally the
case for blacks in spite of often heroic measures to make it so. Black
couples would sometimes seek and gain permission to travel long distances
simply to visit each other, for example. Nonetheless, with spouses and
children libel to be traded away by slave holders at any time, everything was
tenuous and that had to be accepted by the people so afflicted in order to
endure it.
