“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
-- Abraham Lincoln, “Lyceum Address,” (1838) –
INTRODUCTION
Is it possible, given prevailing principles and practices, to overcome racism in the United States?
If not -- if destruction be out lot…
We went in search of what is newest. We found it in what is oldest.
It is possible to create a new pair of glasses to view racism.
The Patecte does exactly that.
* * *
Like you, I watched reports of attacks on statues and Aunt Jemima.
Like you, I am not convinced by what anybody is saying.
Jefferson´s descendants, black and white, had a discussion which went, well, …where exactly? J.K. Rowling and other authors signed a letter of warning about attacks on slavery-connected whites going too far. The warning, because it is so pro forma, routinized, standardized, fails to resonate.
What is creating the hollow nullité sonore:
The American solution to racism is infected with the problem.
Positive racism – giving blacks and other minorities bonus points and gold stars just for showing up – is still racism. Like a virus which is not alive because it cannot reproduce by itself, racism gets inside and uses the machinery of reproduction which healthy cells contain.
Racism being racism, why should it be surprising that positive racism doesn´t work? The proof is in the pudding, where it literally counts: money. The Brookings Institute:
“Just how large and persistent are these racial wealth gaps? … Median net worth for white households has far exceeded that of Black households through recessions and booms over the last thirty years. While movements in white wealth are easier to see due to the larger scale, during the most recent economic downturn, median net worth declined by more for Black families (44.3 percent decline from 2007 to 2013) than for white families (26.1 percent decline). In fact, the ratio of white family wealth to Black family wealth is higher today than at the start of the century.”
Positive racism is not performed to eliminate/reduce racism, which is its manifest purpose. Its latent – real -- purpose is to buy political support from its immediate beneficiaries, a microfaction of clamoring politicos and hustlers.
Joe Biden sent them a message when he announced that as president he would designate billions of dollars to improve racial equality. I assure you from decades of experience in politics, visions of sugarplums right now are dancing through the head of many an inside agitator.
Throwing money at a problem is vintage Americana. We have all been there before, many times. Megabucks go out; nothing comes back. Nothing. Zero, nix, nada, rien.
Sidebar. You, dear reader, might want to wonder:
Buying somebody is one thing.
Will they stay bought is another.
* * *
If destruction be out lot… Before proceeding I want to underline why racism is so deadly. Black Lives Matter got that part of it right.
The problem is racism is genetically incompatible with democracy.
Two definitions:
“Caste”: each of the hereditary classes of Hindu society, distinguished by relative degrees of ritual purity or pollution and of social status.
“Class”: a division of a society based on social and economic status.
You just saw the prevailing definition in the United States of caste. It is thought to pertain to India and other Hindu societies – “dirty,” dirt-poor, superstitious places frozen in time – not to us.
In truth, the identifying marker is the word “hereditary.” You are born into a caste. You inherit it --- and it inherits you.
Contrary to everything you see and hear, the United States has a caste system just like Hindu societies. The U.S. caste system is based on race. You are born into a racial caste – and there is nothing you can do about it.
A classic case of somebody who found out the hard way was Rachel Dolezal. Remember her? The white woman who identified with blacks and passed herself as black? The unabashed, unabridged fury -- the enrage and outrage against her was colossal and from on all sides.
Sorry, Rachel, you are either born black or you aren´t. What you think, say, feel, write, wish, want, decide, believe or try to do about it make no difference whatsoever.
Such is not the case with socioeconomic classes whose members are in constant circulation up and down.
No matter how “democracy” is defined, castes are inherently anti-democratic because people are not given an equal opportunity solely because of something they had absolutely no control over-- their birth. Hereditary classes are the essence of another system, aristocracy, not of democracy.
Oil and water don´t mix. Eventually, either the racial caste system or democracy will win out. Abraham Lincoln said it best in his Lyceum Address.
What, then, is the answer?
What would non-racism look like?
PART I
If I hadn´t seen it, I wouldn´t have believed it.
Atahualpa Stadium, Quito, Ecuador.
Why is a football stadium built in 1951 in any way remarkable?
What North Americans are about to read is, initially at any rate, inconceivable.
On a primary level, the closest equivalent to Atahualpa Stadium would be if Jews erected a statue to Adolph Hitler in Telavi.
In 1529-1532, the heirs to the Inca throne, Atahualpa and Huascar, fought a civil war. Huascar lost despite his alliance with the Patecte´s creators, the Cañari people, in what is now Ecuador.
Atahualpa sought revenge, and got it. He massacred 60,000 Cañari males.
How, then, can anybody name a stadium after a man who slaughtered his ancestors?
Three responses:
First, a stadium or statue or monument need not express approval. In various cultures, it only says something important happened here you should know about. A boundary in history; a marker.
Second, the Cañaris were part of the Inca empire, but not willingly. They waged a type of guerrilla war against the Inca rulers who responded by forcibly resettling at least 70,000 Cañaris in distant lands. They were replaced by 50,000 Inca colonists.
Those colonists are why Ecuadorians today have a strong probability of having Inca, as well as Cañari, ancestors. The upshot: for them Atahualpa is not entirely a “they,” i.e., an invader, an outsider, an enemy. He is us.
Parallels exist in the United States. One study concluded the average black American is 17%-18% white. Conversely, 50 million whites have at least one black ancestor.
Few American blacks or whites identify themselves as mulattos/mixed, despite the realities just indicated. In the 2010 census, a mere 2.9% of all Americans chose more than one racial category to describe themselves.
Why don´t – make that, can´t -- Americans admit the obvious?
Here a monstrously successful ideological construct enters the picture.
* * *
“Every culture produces, in an unbelievably
appropriate and rigid way, a philosophy that
fits its needs like a glove.”
-- Jules Henry, "Culture Against Man* --
White, black, yellow, red, etc.: the prevailing racial construct is most likely Western European in origin. That group was the only one with the material means early on to have visited Africa, the Orient and America.
The construct likes to pass itself off as a self-evident truth, eternal, absolute. It is in reality nothing of the sort. Cross cultural inquiry reveals it to be a socio-ideological complex which differs across societies. PBS got it right while investigating a key component of the construct -- the American rule that if you have one drop of black blood, you are all black:
“Not only does the one-drop rule apply to no other group than American blacks, but apparently the rule is unique in that it is found only in the United States and not in any other nation in the world. In fact, definitions of who is black vary quite sharply from country to country, and for this reason people in other countries often express consternation about our definition.”
Why are definitions ultimately decisive?
(i) He who makes the definition of the situation controls the situation.
(ii) He who controls the situation makes the rules of the game.
(iii) He who makes the rules of the game has the power and wins the game.
Behind the Western European definition of races is the same old tired but true dictum of the Roman Empire: Divide et Impera. It continues to work fabulously well for the powers that be. It fits like a glove.
President Obama followed the existing norm when he identified himself as black, even though his mother was white. Sorry, Obama, you are not black; you are a mulatto. As we showed above, when it comes to castes, what Obama thinks, says, feels, writes, wishes, wants, decides, believes or tries to do about it makes no difference.
Sidebar: the U.S. census pretends to overcome the caste system by letting people chose what race they belong to. As we shall see, that is part of the psychologically poetic nature of American racism.
There is another model than running away from what is patent: Muhammed Ali. The Irish Times:
“In 2009 the three-time heavyweight champion of the world was greeted with a civic reception in the Co Clare town to commemorate the fact that his great grandfather - Abe Grady - came from Ennis.
After living on Turnpike Road, Grady emigrated to the United States in the 1860s where he made his home in Kentucky and married an African-American woman who had been freed from a life of slavery.”
As far as I can determine, Ali gave no speeches before or after the reunion. No need to shout certain things from the rooftop. He was simply there. In so doing, he took the first step toward surpassing the prevailing ideological complex which may explain the following:
Although I am sure Ali´s family reunion was reported somewhere in the American press, I have yet to find it. For those who don´t believe it happened, the reunion is on YouTube.
There is somebody who continuously, definitively beats the Occidental European construct: the so-called indigenous people in Cañar and Azuay provinces of Ecuador. “So-called” because when asked how they view themselves, Indians, Indigenous people, Natives, etc., their answer is always the same:
None of the above.
We will reveal it in a moment.
Finally, the third explanation of the naming of Atahualpa Stadium is far subtler – also far more basic. In fact, the other two explanations require the third as an a priori; it is the cultural context in which they appear and makes them meaningful.
PART II
There is a place that has no name.
Atahualpa Stadium displays it. The vocabulary does not yet exist to describe it.
The word supersession has a lot to do with the place, i.e., to take the place of; replacement of a person or thing previously in authority or use. From the Latin supersedēre.
The place without a name is past tolerance.
It is beyond forgiveness -- nobody in Ecuador forgives Atahualpa. Most likely, that idea never occurred to them.
It also exceeds innocence. The people know what Atahualpa did.
It is other than deliverance; other than salvation.
The place with no name even surpasses Nemesis: divine justice; winged balancer of life; to give what is due.
The place is a characteristic of pre-Colombian society. However, it is a human archetype, and consequently is found in all cultures including Western European ones. The Italian movie “The Bicycle Thieves” (1948), which is the artistic model for our documentary on the Patecte, powerfully indicates the place with no name as never before for Western audiences.
Beyond, past, more than, surpass. Before, exceeding, beyond the bounds of, beyond the range of, beside, in front of, except, other than, by. In ancient times all those concepts were embodied in a single Latin word. It is seldom used today, and for a reason.
Praeter is straight out of the primordial source of language, when one word encompassed numerous other, sometimes conflicting terms. With specialization that original unity was lost; the different meanings with broken out, went their own way.
Another ancient Latin term, homo sacer, (sacred man) illustrates the point. It combined the concepts of sacred and filthy.
Residues of the original unity exist even in the U.S.A. Bill Clinton was the honorable president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world; you probably would like to meet him, shake his hand.
Simultaneously, he was a “dirty politician.”
Here I will concentrate on one meaning of praeter; it seems to encompass all the others:
Before.
The Patecte is a creation of an ancient world. It disappeared under the heels of three conquering armies – the Incas in 1463-1490, the Spanish in the 1530s, and today´s never-ending marginalization by the mass media and other institutions.
Before… The Patecte is praeter-racism in the fullest sense of the term. The reason why is simple, clear.
For thousands of years, other racial groups were unknown to the Cañaris.
DNA tests show they are descended from people who arrived in Amazonia over 16,000 years ago.
Their ancestors arrived from Asia across what is now the Bering Strait. They migrated south as the Ice Age receded.
Archaeological evidence shows the presence of a sedimentary population in the Cañar region dating back to 2,500 BC.
The ancient Cañaris were not unified. Politically, geographically and in genealogical lineage they were comprised of over 80 independent groups. Communities in four river basins shared language, ceramics, metallurgy, cosmovision and agricultural practices. The cacique system overlapped networks of extended families.
Local autonomy was supported by numerous microclimates that yielded a large variety of agricultural products. Exchanges of goods and services in Cañar were brisk.
The point: how “before” becomes “after.” In one form or another, no matter how faint, before lives on.
The non-racist, autonomous, local, family centered nature of ancient Cañari life has residues today. They are what enable their descendants to be beyond the range of the Western European racist construct outlined above.
To wit:
When asked how they identify themselves, Indian, indigenous, Native, etc., the descendants invariably mention the village where they live.
The Patecte was a creation of that pre-racist -- praeter-racist -- world. To a remarkable degree, the Patecte represented it.
America is a mobile society. Nobody is suggesting it can supersede racism by having people predominately identify themselves as the city or town where they live. However, there is more than one equivalent to overcoming racism.
To find it involves looking at other deeply divisive issues which have been superseded in the American experience.
I will mention one – the issue which roiled the country in the 1920s: the temperance movement.
The movement for abstinence from alcohol grew and gained the upper hand, creating a national prohibition, 1920-1933.
Today, virtually nobody cares about temperance, asks about it, talks about it, thinks about it. Temperance has been superseded not only in law but also where it truly matters: culture.
Concretely, nobody, such as large funding institutions in their application forms, asks, “What is your position on alcoholic beverages?” They do, however, ask about your race.
This is not the place to analyze in depth the Patecte´s relationship to non-racism, the praeter place; our documentary does it. Two probative notes:
(1) One of the Patecte´s elements, the snake, was discussed by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung:
"Perhaps the commonest dream symbol of transcendence is the snake, as represented by the therapeutic symbol of the Roman god of medicine Aesclepius, which has survived to modern times as a sign of the medical profession. This was originally a nonpoisonous tree snake; as we see it, coiled around the staff of the healing god, it seems to embody a kind of mediation between earth and heaven.”**
(2) In nature, the adult bird, lion and serpent are mortal enemies. In the Patecte they are together in harmony.
CONCLUSION
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
A CNN headline about Joe Biden´s pick for vice president gave the latest manifestation of infection of the solution by the problem: “Why Kamela Harris Embraces Her Biracial Roots.” Try as they might – or pretend to try -- they just can´t get over racism. Beyond it. Replace it. Supersede it.
Racism is the crack in the diamond of the United States. It can never be repaired, fixed – at least under the principles and practices in vogue.
Sidebar: a solution presents itself:
Get a new diamond.
In the place with no name, of supersession, one´s race is on the level of one´s thumb. To be proud or ashamed of it is nonsense. Consequently, it does not occur to anybody.
To sum up: why all current attempts to end racism in the U.S. are doomed:
They attempt to moderate or reconcile racial-ethnic contradictions, instead of superseding them.
Alcoholics Anonymous understands and puts into practice a key human dynamic. To receive their help, a person must publicly admit they are an alcoholic. No acknowledgement, no entry. AA knows there is no point in trying to deal with a secret that people keep even from themselves.
Unlike Ecuadorians, until Americans (i) accept their multi-racial origins – “So what?” -- and (ii) freely state that acceptance publicly, they will never move past/beyond/exceed racism.
They will be forever locked in the Occidental European ideological construct. That means, when it comes to racism, they will continue to lead psychologically poetic lives.
That is to say: they wish something were true.
But it isn´t.
Images: (i)The praeter place. Different species play together peacefully before they have "learned" certain distinctions. (ii) The Patecte.
All citation sources available on request.
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*Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Random House, New York, 1963, p. 57.
** Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, page 153.