A few years ago, late into Barack Obama’s presidential administration, maybe in 2015 or even early 2016, I had a long messaging conversation with an acquaintance about some of the right-wing movements and talking points that had become prevalent over the previous few years, specifically the fear-mongering over “they’re going to take our guns.” “They” being liberal people or more specifically Democrats.
This is a really interesting take. Thank you for processing this book that the algorithms probably never would have served to me. Being the ignoramus that I am, I did not know that there was a link between Tacitus and Nazi/white supremacist storytelling. But, you know, the classics are irrelevant to what is Happening Now. This will be on my mind when I finally read Germania.
I think there is validity in the thread, but as with everything, there is nuance. The white America that we want to indict fought against itself to free black slaves, and fought against the Nazi vision of the future.
Also, from my experience, while I've never personally heard a white-supremacist argument for gun ownership and stand your ground doctrine (until this article), I've heard plenty of arguments straight out of the Hebrew Bible. The law portion of the Pentateuch is full of examples how to adjudicate adverse situations-if your axe head flies off the handle and kills your coworker, if your ox gores your neighbor, if your ox gores someone a second time, if you are attacked in daylight, if your home is invaded at night, etc. These are passages that get cited directly, and while the task of the historian is often to make sense of why we accept one thing and reject another (kill the intruder, turn the other cheek), in terms of direct influence, those are the texts that many evangelicals are looking at. I've lived my entire life around the 45th parallel, so maybe the influence this author is discussing is more overt elsewhere.
Another angle on your opening scene: The premillennial eschatology (rapture theology) your friend mentions is a credible influence in my mind. How strange that those who think they are going to be raptured out of the tribulations are so fearful of them. However another (again, more direct) take is that there is a sizable contingent of people who say they want to take away their guns. Politicians campaign promising it. Constituents elect on it. There are political organizations and PACs and lobbying groups devoted to it. There are states and municipalities that have presently banned gun ownership.
I'm not here to defend the stance one way or another, but that makes me confused why anyone would need another reason for the perpetual fear that "they're going to take my guns." Sure, some might say, "We just want to ban assault-style rifles," (whatever that means) but you don't need to introduce the slippery-slope argument to find the voices that explicitly say they want to end gun ownership in America. If people stopped saying they want to take them away, and people keep being afraid of it, then we can dissect the psyche further to figure out why.
Yes, I think it's important to continually unravel a conflation of "whiteness" as a culture with people who happen to be pale-skinned. As I am constantly trying to delve into, for my own education, whatever drives colonialism and oppression isn't tied to skin color, and I think is drove many of our ancestors out of Europe (not all, obviously, but many). I had a section in here that I cut for length about Michael Harriott's Twitter thread some time ago about whiteness and his very unique take that whiteness isn't about skin color, but is about how hard you can oppress others. He started with the "how the Irish became white" explanation, which is well documented.
Honestly, we probably need another word for it. But within the framework of this book, she's making the case that whiteness was created as a property to be valued, and I think that's born out by her extensive research, particularly letters and essays by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. Just because they were mistaken about skin color/bloodline being equivalent to culture, though, doesn't mean everyone else is or has always been. An important distinction.
I wish I could speak more to my acquaintance's experience, but my upbringing wasn't anything like that. Episcopaleans are probably known more for gin and tonics than fire and brimstone. But from our extensive conversation, what I understood was that she was raised in a very fear-based Baptist church in a very fear-oriented community. I imagine -- and again I'm only guessing here -- that if Rapture had been framed as something to look forward to, a welcoming of God, then it might have been different, but if it was preached as something to fear with no assurance that you yourself will not be left behind, then . . . well, you're talking about children who were probably terrified and just desperately wanted their parents.
The gun argument is a good one, and I think gets straight to the heart of our problems with media, echo chambers, etc. My asking my friend was my first foray into that because I just did not understand. It made no sense to me. NOW it makes sense, but it took a long time to get to that point. And it's not like I'm not prone to the same thinking -- expose myself to the right kind of news and it doesn't take long for me to be quivering in fear at a Handmaid's Tale future, as ridiculous as that sounds to someone outside my head.
The thing is, there's always going to be someone saying the most extreme version of something (and this is a far larger conversation, but with the usual "I'm a gun owner" caveat, I lived close to Newtown when Sandy Hook happened, and the NRA's response to that pretty much ensured that gun owners would be painted as irresponsible, trigger-happy crazy heads; they brought that on themselves), and corporate media will always find a way to make hay of it. I don't see a way around that. Finding connection and interpersonal understanding in messy areas in between is the only effective response I've seen so far. It's not an easy place to be but I think it's necessary, especially as long as people are willing to believe the most extreme version of anything they're told, which none of us are immune from!
Thinking of how the right to property and life also manifests as the right to war. My brother and I watched the first 3 seasons of Peaky Blinders (and stopped for reasons unrelated to this tangent) and a big theme was how the horrors of WWI gave men a common language and a common trauma.
I found that very irksome, and in trying to figure out *why* I was so annoyed, I settled on this: White men, as a class, have to find war outside. They go looking abroad for enemies because they don’t face an existential threat in their communities.
The rest of us - the racialized minorities, and the white women who don’t want to be bartering chips - we’re at war at home. We’re not safe in our neighborhoods, our cities, or our own living rooms. But we are never, ever allowed to articulate these day-to-day threats as war. Because war implies that both sides have a right to retaliation and self-defense.
And that unspoken assumption is also part of why liberal white people are so easily swayed into “compromise”. Sure, they’ll agree that the alt-right is loud, violent, un-presidential, violent, embarrassing, VIOLENT. But the second a racial minority dares to suggest disruptive protest, that’s an inch too far. Self-defense can only be enacted if you have an individual and collective self to defend, and racial minorities are disbarred from that level of sentience.
These are great, great points, especially about finding war outside versus having war inflicted on you at home. (Tangential, but it made me think of my mental answer when people valorize soldiers because "they get shot at," and I think, "Not to trivialize what war does to people, but at this point teenagers in American schools get shot at a lot, too.")
But also, it opens up another whole part of her book, which is about the dangers of "free black bodies." She has a lot on that. A number of historical examples and quotes, specifically on people's perception about the dangers of emancipation, but also bringing it all back into the concept of whiteness as property: "According to the logic of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, freedom is the right of cherished white property. Free black bodies thus possess something that does not belong to them. Free black bodies have essentially intruded upon the white space." I'm sure there's more to it as well, but bringing in the exceptionalism of whiteness makes *so much sense* of how white protests are perceived and responded to--no matter how violent or destructive they get--versus protests that are in support of and/or attended by people of color, no matter how peaceful: "A free black body is a dangerous body because it threatens the very social order. . . . By entering into the white space, and perhaps even thriving in it, a free black body contests the very notion of white supremacy."
Ooooh the way this country has yet to acknowledge that American soldier deaths are negligible when compared to even the civilian casualties we’ve inflicted on other countries. War is hell but we’re not sharing that hell equally - and this constant sense of woundedness is a bedrock of American politics. Crying bloody murder when we’re obviously the bully.
Side note but this is also why, in light of the pandemic, 9/11 pageantry makes me feel cold inside. The disconnect between 2000ish people being considered a national loss but 600k+ being an unfortunate thing we must move around and ignore? Unfathomable.
Brown Douglas’s book is going on my ever expanding to-read pile, for sure. I wonder if she considers this particular work in relation to Afropessimism, which is all about the impossibility of a free black person.
Yeah, for me even at the time of 9/11 I thought instantly about how 30,000 people die in car crashes every year (it's closer to 40,000 a year now) and nobody blinks. That shouldn't be okay! But also I'd lived overseas for quite a while and known so much more damage ... it was impossible to reconcile the world's compassionate reaction to an attack on this country with our reaction to attacks on others, especially when the U.S. is doing the attacking.
She didn't use the word Afropessimism (I'm not familiar with it, either) but I think significant portions address that subject. The premise of the book, how it starts, is with Barack Obama asking whether Trayvon Martin could have "stood his ground" and Douglas's examination into what and who those laws are for -- that Trayvon never could have used that defense because it's only to protect whiteness.
She spends a lot of time on the struggle of Black faith in the face of all of that, which sounds adjacent to that pessimism. She's an Episcopal priest, so that probably informs her lens and she starts out by talking about the growth of Black faith in enslaved people. "Black faith was forged in the midst of the perverse and tragic paradoxes of black life. It is a faith, therefore, that does not ignore the unthinkable and irrational terror of black living." She talks about faith being weapon "born in slavery" that provided a "counternarrative to those who would say that God created black bodies to be chattel."
I'm going to lose the thread here because she says it all more eloquently than I can paraphrase (also I'm an atheist so it's hard to wrap my head around faith's role in answering injustice), but she talks about how the faith of the Anglo-Saxon-oriented church that legitimizes slavery and racism is in fact sin, and that Black faith is a true interaction between God and his people.
I don't want to make that sound too wishy washy because her arguments about faith delve deep into the Black experience in America and what it takes to believe in something, even self-worth, when you live in a society that is constructed to make you believe otherwise. She's a *really* eloquent and persuasive writer.
Seriously. I am very unsympathetic to people’s “once all the Boomers die off things will be fine” stance. The problems in front of us are older than that and will find their own manifestation (besides which, hoping for the eradication of a specific group of people is not actually a moral position to find oneself in).
I’ve been reading this slowly, grateful for how deftly and clearly — not to mention empathically — you educate us.
What I'm doing is just trying to educate myself and taking everyone else along for the ride if they want to come ;)
This is a really interesting take. Thank you for processing this book that the algorithms probably never would have served to me. Being the ignoramus that I am, I did not know that there was a link between Tacitus and Nazi/white supremacist storytelling. But, you know, the classics are irrelevant to what is Happening Now. This will be on my mind when I finally read Germania.
I think there is validity in the thread, but as with everything, there is nuance. The white America that we want to indict fought against itself to free black slaves, and fought against the Nazi vision of the future.
Also, from my experience, while I've never personally heard a white-supremacist argument for gun ownership and stand your ground doctrine (until this article), I've heard plenty of arguments straight out of the Hebrew Bible. The law portion of the Pentateuch is full of examples how to adjudicate adverse situations-if your axe head flies off the handle and kills your coworker, if your ox gores your neighbor, if your ox gores someone a second time, if you are attacked in daylight, if your home is invaded at night, etc. These are passages that get cited directly, and while the task of the historian is often to make sense of why we accept one thing and reject another (kill the intruder, turn the other cheek), in terms of direct influence, those are the texts that many evangelicals are looking at. I've lived my entire life around the 45th parallel, so maybe the influence this author is discussing is more overt elsewhere.
Another angle on your opening scene: The premillennial eschatology (rapture theology) your friend mentions is a credible influence in my mind. How strange that those who think they are going to be raptured out of the tribulations are so fearful of them. However another (again, more direct) take is that there is a sizable contingent of people who say they want to take away their guns. Politicians campaign promising it. Constituents elect on it. There are political organizations and PACs and lobbying groups devoted to it. There are states and municipalities that have presently banned gun ownership.
I'm not here to defend the stance one way or another, but that makes me confused why anyone would need another reason for the perpetual fear that "they're going to take my guns." Sure, some might say, "We just want to ban assault-style rifles," (whatever that means) but you don't need to introduce the slippery-slope argument to find the voices that explicitly say they want to end gun ownership in America. If people stopped saying they want to take them away, and people keep being afraid of it, then we can dissect the psyche further to figure out why.
Yes, I think it's important to continually unravel a conflation of "whiteness" as a culture with people who happen to be pale-skinned. As I am constantly trying to delve into, for my own education, whatever drives colonialism and oppression isn't tied to skin color, and I think is drove many of our ancestors out of Europe (not all, obviously, but many). I had a section in here that I cut for length about Michael Harriott's Twitter thread some time ago about whiteness and his very unique take that whiteness isn't about skin color, but is about how hard you can oppress others. He started with the "how the Irish became white" explanation, which is well documented.
Honestly, we probably need another word for it. But within the framework of this book, she's making the case that whiteness was created as a property to be valued, and I think that's born out by her extensive research, particularly letters and essays by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. Just because they were mistaken about skin color/bloodline being equivalent to culture, though, doesn't mean everyone else is or has always been. An important distinction.
I wish I could speak more to my acquaintance's experience, but my upbringing wasn't anything like that. Episcopaleans are probably known more for gin and tonics than fire and brimstone. But from our extensive conversation, what I understood was that she was raised in a very fear-based Baptist church in a very fear-oriented community. I imagine -- and again I'm only guessing here -- that if Rapture had been framed as something to look forward to, a welcoming of God, then it might have been different, but if it was preached as something to fear with no assurance that you yourself will not be left behind, then . . . well, you're talking about children who were probably terrified and just desperately wanted their parents.
The gun argument is a good one, and I think gets straight to the heart of our problems with media, echo chambers, etc. My asking my friend was my first foray into that because I just did not understand. It made no sense to me. NOW it makes sense, but it took a long time to get to that point. And it's not like I'm not prone to the same thinking -- expose myself to the right kind of news and it doesn't take long for me to be quivering in fear at a Handmaid's Tale future, as ridiculous as that sounds to someone outside my head.
The thing is, there's always going to be someone saying the most extreme version of something (and this is a far larger conversation, but with the usual "I'm a gun owner" caveat, I lived close to Newtown when Sandy Hook happened, and the NRA's response to that pretty much ensured that gun owners would be painted as irresponsible, trigger-happy crazy heads; they brought that on themselves), and corporate media will always find a way to make hay of it. I don't see a way around that. Finding connection and interpersonal understanding in messy areas in between is the only effective response I've seen so far. It's not an easy place to be but I think it's necessary, especially as long as people are willing to believe the most extreme version of anything they're told, which none of us are immune from!
Thinking of how the right to property and life also manifests as the right to war. My brother and I watched the first 3 seasons of Peaky Blinders (and stopped for reasons unrelated to this tangent) and a big theme was how the horrors of WWI gave men a common language and a common trauma.
I found that very irksome, and in trying to figure out *why* I was so annoyed, I settled on this: White men, as a class, have to find war outside. They go looking abroad for enemies because they don’t face an existential threat in their communities.
The rest of us - the racialized minorities, and the white women who don’t want to be bartering chips - we’re at war at home. We’re not safe in our neighborhoods, our cities, or our own living rooms. But we are never, ever allowed to articulate these day-to-day threats as war. Because war implies that both sides have a right to retaliation and self-defense.
And that unspoken assumption is also part of why liberal white people are so easily swayed into “compromise”. Sure, they’ll agree that the alt-right is loud, violent, un-presidential, violent, embarrassing, VIOLENT. But the second a racial minority dares to suggest disruptive protest, that’s an inch too far. Self-defense can only be enacted if you have an individual and collective self to defend, and racial minorities are disbarred from that level of sentience.
These are great, great points, especially about finding war outside versus having war inflicted on you at home. (Tangential, but it made me think of my mental answer when people valorize soldiers because "they get shot at," and I think, "Not to trivialize what war does to people, but at this point teenagers in American schools get shot at a lot, too.")
But also, it opens up another whole part of her book, which is about the dangers of "free black bodies." She has a lot on that. A number of historical examples and quotes, specifically on people's perception about the dangers of emancipation, but also bringing it all back into the concept of whiteness as property: "According to the logic of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, freedom is the right of cherished white property. Free black bodies thus possess something that does not belong to them. Free black bodies have essentially intruded upon the white space." I'm sure there's more to it as well, but bringing in the exceptionalism of whiteness makes *so much sense* of how white protests are perceived and responded to--no matter how violent or destructive they get--versus protests that are in support of and/or attended by people of color, no matter how peaceful: "A free black body is a dangerous body because it threatens the very social order. . . . By entering into the white space, and perhaps even thriving in it, a free black body contests the very notion of white supremacy."
Ooooh the way this country has yet to acknowledge that American soldier deaths are negligible when compared to even the civilian casualties we’ve inflicted on other countries. War is hell but we’re not sharing that hell equally - and this constant sense of woundedness is a bedrock of American politics. Crying bloody murder when we’re obviously the bully.
Side note but this is also why, in light of the pandemic, 9/11 pageantry makes me feel cold inside. The disconnect between 2000ish people being considered a national loss but 600k+ being an unfortunate thing we must move around and ignore? Unfathomable.
Brown Douglas’s book is going on my ever expanding to-read pile, for sure. I wonder if she considers this particular work in relation to Afropessimism, which is all about the impossibility of a free black person.
Yeah, for me even at the time of 9/11 I thought instantly about how 30,000 people die in car crashes every year (it's closer to 40,000 a year now) and nobody blinks. That shouldn't be okay! But also I'd lived overseas for quite a while and known so much more damage ... it was impossible to reconcile the world's compassionate reaction to an attack on this country with our reaction to attacks on others, especially when the U.S. is doing the attacking.
She didn't use the word Afropessimism (I'm not familiar with it, either) but I think significant portions address that subject. The premise of the book, how it starts, is with Barack Obama asking whether Trayvon Martin could have "stood his ground" and Douglas's examination into what and who those laws are for -- that Trayvon never could have used that defense because it's only to protect whiteness.
She spends a lot of time on the struggle of Black faith in the face of all of that, which sounds adjacent to that pessimism. She's an Episcopal priest, so that probably informs her lens and she starts out by talking about the growth of Black faith in enslaved people. "Black faith was forged in the midst of the perverse and tragic paradoxes of black life. It is a faith, therefore, that does not ignore the unthinkable and irrational terror of black living." She talks about faith being weapon "born in slavery" that provided a "counternarrative to those who would say that God created black bodies to be chattel."
I'm going to lose the thread here because she says it all more eloquently than I can paraphrase (also I'm an atheist so it's hard to wrap my head around faith's role in answering injustice), but she talks about how the faith of the Anglo-Saxon-oriented church that legitimizes slavery and racism is in fact sin, and that Black faith is a true interaction between God and his people.
I don't want to make that sound too wishy washy because her arguments about faith delve deep into the Black experience in America and what it takes to believe in something, even self-worth, when you live in a society that is constructed to make you believe otherwise. She's a *really* eloquent and persuasive writer.
I really like this: "Protecting the treasured property of whiteness is an overwhelming and centuries-long iteration of that war."
I used to think that once all the old white guys died off things would be better. But goddamn if the younger ones aren't even worse.
Also, I have never written "fuck this guy" on so many Post-It notes when reading a book for research.
Seriously. I am very unsympathetic to people’s “once all the Boomers die off things will be fine” stance. The problems in front of us are older than that and will find their own manifestation (besides which, hoping for the eradication of a specific group of people is not actually a moral position to find oneself in).