A community member asked where exactly the violence was in deleting comments.
I answered her by noting both the violence in the act itself, and the historical violence of erasing, denying, and minimizing actions for which a given person, or, writ larger, a given society does not want to accept responsibility.
This article speaks to this in a grand way. Most of us know of ‘Mein Kampf’ ; almost no one knows of the document, an American one, which was the template for it.
Americans do not like to think of their society as racist at its core, and has basically collectively chosen to bury any evidence of the sort, except for egregious texts that are assumed to only have been perused by fringe cohorts.
That is simply not true. Racism was more than tolerated; it was encouraged. It changed only when it was externalized by events in Europe. Jonathan Peter Spiro puts it this way in the article:
““Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology. ”
This amnesia has not been an accident; it has been by design, a way to effect plausible deniability in our complicity, indeed America’s active role in codifying and embedding racism. Can you imagine the change in dynamic and in context if Grant had been presented in the same way Hitler’s screed was, and white people started from jump understanding and internalizing the similarities and the effects in the classroom, with as strong of a sense of horror and shock as we were given by Hitler’s writings?
When Americans clutch their pearls at other countries’ racism, particularly countries like Germany in this case, or South Africa, which ripped whole swaths of Jim Crow laws in order to institutionalize their methodical racism and oppression of Black people there, they do so without either knowledge or acknowledgement of the role of American society, academics, or legislation that other countries drew upon.
Only in the last 80 years or so have Americans even been close to denouncing racism and xenophobia, and even then, with neutralizing caveats and disingenuous rationalizations. This matters, because it goes to the heart of the Myth of White Benevolence, of which I have spoken for months. Not only has it happened here, but in Europe as well; the horror of the genocide in Germany has served to give other Europeans a pass in both their application of racism, and their collusion and profiteering from it.
And today’s massacre in New Zealand is in stark relief, with a politician calling for Muslim expulsion, even as a government official insisted ‘This is not who we are’. But according to pic from or who have visited NZ they have been almost unanimous in declaring that like their neighbor Australia, that virulent racism and white supremacy abounds.
Documents as shown in the article, and others (how many others? we will never know, will we?) which have been suppressed and destroyed to support the myth, have had such a deleterious effect on the efforts to end white supremacy, and white people’s resistance and denial of the phenomenon of racism at all.
That erasure and denial of the record is violence. On so many levels. Whether it’s a white person in this space deciding for themselves that they want to erase their words and actions, or the studied acts of an entire nation, it is violence.
No hearts or likes; comments only. And let’s stipulate that it’s horrible, so please keep comments like ‘Oh, it’s terrible’ to a minimum. What I am interested in is your thoughts about how historical erasure has shaped your thoughts about racism, from the earliest days of the classroom and beyond.
Edited to add: people are sharing this post, which is gratifying. Please also take the small amount of additional time to include my commentary. You will have to cut and paste it; or check the box that says include additional post. Thank you. If I take the time to write commentary on an article, please be kind enough to share it as well.
