The Garifuna in Honduras: A History of Pillage and Dispossession

By Yanis Iqbal

Originally published at Green Social Thought.

Amid the current Covid-19 pandemic, the Garifuna community of Honduras is experiencing state-sponsored violence and regulated repression. On July 18 2020, heavily armed personnel of the Police Investigation Department (DPI) barged into the house of Alberth Sneider Centeno, Garifuna president of the land community of El Triunfo de la Cruz, and abducted him. Later, the same armed group kidnapped Suami Aparicio Mejía García, Gerardo Mizael Rochez Cálix and Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, members of the OFRANEH (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), and a fifth person, Junior Rafael Juárez Mejía. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) has issued a statement saying “that the kidnapping of these people is motivated by the activity of the Garifuna people in defense of their ancestral lands and the rights of Afro-indigenous and indigenous people in these territories.”

The Honduran Solidarity Network (HSN) has similarly stated that “There are powerful people and businesses that have every interest in terrorizing the Garifuna communities in Tela Bay including Triunfo de la Cruz. Snider Centeno was an outspoken leader fighting against the global tourist industry allied with powerful and wealthy families in Honduras. Centeno was defending his community's collective and ancestral land rights. An investigation into the Honduran government's role in not only the kidnapping but also the context in which the kidnappings occurred, is absolutely necessary and important. The Honduran government has violated the Garifuna's land rights for decades.”

From the statements issued by CGT and HSN, it is clear that the kidnapping is not a regionally restricted event. Rather, it is an act involving myriad actors, both national and international. For example, DPI, the armed group responsible for the kidnapping, is a police force which is economically supported by the US State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. With American assistance, the DPI has enormously expanded and by 2022, it is expected to have 3,000 personnel or 12% of the entire Honduran force.

Furthermore, the authoritarian alacrity with which the state has suppressed protests against the kidnappings betokens that there is something deeper of which the government is afraid. These peaceful protests were carried out by the residents of El Triunfo de la Cruz, Sambo Creek, Nueva Armenia and Corozal on Highway CA-13 and demanded that the 5 Garifuna activists be returned alive. In order to understand the underlying factors which are shaping the dynamics of violence and intimidation against the Garifuna community, we need to take a look at the historical backdrop against which it is occurring and understand the path-dependent nature of present-day happenings.

The Garifuna people are a community who find their existential roots in the soil of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. In 1675, a ship carrying Mokko people, slated to be enslaved, was wrecked near Saint Vincent, an island in the Caribbean. These people settled in the Caribbean island and resolutely resisted colonialist attempts by the French and British. Inspired by the heroic courage of the indigenous people in Saint Vincent, enslaved Africans escaped from the clutches of colonialism and arrived at the Saint Vincent Island. Through the intermixing of enslaved Africans and Caribs-Arawaks, the Garifuna subjectivity was produced which moored its identity in a revolutionary fight against the savagery of slavery and cruelty of colonialism.

While the Treaty of Paris of 1763 granted to Britain the Saint Vincent Island, the Garifuna people fought against colonialism for 34 long years. It was only in 1797 that the British were able to colonize the island of Saint Vincent, segregate the intermixed population and deport the darker colored Mokko to the island of Roatan, off the Northern coast of Honduras. Initially, the Garifuna community faced a lot of xenophobia and Ramon de Anguiano, the intendant governor of Honduras, had suggested that “all this coast be left clean of blacks...before they multiply further…in order to remove them from this Kingdom a people only good for itself [and] useless for our works”.

Later, it dawned on the Spanish officials that they could exploit the expendable bodies of black workers for mahogany tree cultivation and banana production. The Spanish considered the Garifuna as “diligent in agriculture, incessant in the work of cutting exquisite woods, like ‘fish in the water’ for fishing, skillful sailors, and brave soldiers. By virtue of their physical constitution they are strong and robust; for them, these climes are healthy, and they multiply in great numbers—wherefore they are very suitable for populating the immense wastelands of this coast with benefit to the state, and for forming settlements along the roads, which are so sorely lacking.”

Despite the evident exploitation of Garifuna workers by colonial trade, the community’s territory remained protected. The low population density of the coastal territories ensured that Garifuna people continued to cultivate their ancestral lands at least till the late twentieth century. But beginning in the 1990s, Garifuna land ownership got jeopardized as private investments in activities such as coastal tourism, housing and palm oil production became dominant. Dressed in development, these trade activities pulled to pieces the indigenous culture of the Garifuna people.

While the Garifuna people are present in four different countries (Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala), Honduras has the largest Garifuna population at an estimated 250,000 people located primarily within 48 coastal and island communities. For money-grubbing barons, this meant that “development” required enhanced efforts in Honduras where stronger and sterner techniques would have to be used to subjugate such a large population and conquer their large territory. This type of development was initiated in the 1990s, the age of neoliberalism and Washington Consensus, and the Garifuna labeled it as la maldición – the curse.

In 1992, the government passed the 1992 Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector (LMA) which “promoted foreign and domestic investment in agriculture by accelerating land titling and enabling land cooperative members to break up their holdings into small plots to be sold as private lands.” The Congressional Decree 90-90 supplemented LMA by making foreigners eligible for purchasing coastal lands for tourism.

Earlier, the Honduran constitution had restricted such a free-flowing movement of foreign capital through article 107 which had enunciated that “The land of the Republic, municipal, communal and private property situated on the border zones with neighboring states and on the shores of both oceans for 40 kilometers inland, and the islands, cays, reefs, cliffs, and sand banks, may only be acquired and possessed by Hondurans by birth or corporations made up of only Honduran stockholders and by state institutions, punishable by annulment of the respective title or contract.” Now, any foreign capital seeking to build tourism project is allowed to purchase lands within 40 kilometers of the coast.

Impact of Tourism on the Garifuna People

The Honduran government, apart from instituting the Congressional Decree 90-90, has also passed the Tourism Incentives Law in 2017 which has given a number of benefits to tourism in Honduras: touristic initiatives are exempt from taxes on profits for 15 years, taxes on construction-related activities for 5 years and are provided with the freedom to not pay custom duties and tariffs tax for 10 years. These incentives are paying off as international tourism spending increased from $685 million in 2016 to more than $700 million in 2017. While the pockets of select-few Honduran elites and foreign businessmen get filled to the brim, the unsavory side of tourism is being delicately obscured: As European and American “recreational investors” visit Honduras, the Garifuna people get whipped by the scourge of suppression.

According to Christopher A. Loperena, “Tourism, like mining, is an export-based industry, since the products (e.g. hotel stays, package tours, air and ground transportation) are mostly marketed to, and consumed by, foreigners….Touted as sustainable development, the “industry without smoke” entails the intense commodification of natural and cultural resources, giving rise to recurrent conflicts between subsistence based producers and elite investors.” In Honduras, a number of tourism-related conflicts have arisen between the Garifuna collectivity and politically powerful capitalists and international organizations.

In 2007, for example, “Garifuna land between San Martin and Santa Fe was sold by Omar Laredo, president of the Garifuna community, to a local businessman. There was a community consultation in which it was agreed that about 20 hectares would be sold. The businessman paid $5000 to the president of the Garifuna community and then immediately sold the land for US$20,000 to Randy Jorgensen [a Canadian investor]. Without community consultation, however, the amount of land sold had increased to 53 hectares. According to INA [National Agrarian Institute] surveys done later, Jorgensen then actually fenced-in 62 hectares.” In a similarly shoddy manner, lands belonging to the villages of Cristales and Guadalupe were usurped by Canadian investors and the entire village of Rio Negro was evicted to make way for the construction of “Banana Coast” cruise ship port, a project of the Life Vision Properties, a company owned by Randy Jorgen.

John Thompson, a close friend of Randy Jorgensen, while arguing for the benefits of the cruise terminal in Rio Negro, said that “This cruise ship terminal is vitally important to this entire town . . . all these people are going to lose everything that they could possibly have here because of this. Because he’s [referring to Jorgensen] about to give up and go home. And then we’ll be left on our own, with no money, no cruise ships, no passengers, no airport. Nothing. That’s it. So these people are killing the golden goose.” No one apparently knows what else was left for the Garifuna to lose. With the loss of ancestral territories, Garifuna lose everything and according to Miriam Miranda, the coordinator of OFRANEH, “Without our lands, we cease to be a people. Our lands and identities are critical to our lives, our waters, our forests, our culture, our global commons, our territories. For us, the struggle for our territories and our commons and our natural resources is of primary importance to preserve ourselves as a people.”

Eco-tourism, a sub-category of tourism related to the visiting of fragile and endangered ecosystems, is a “green” way of dispossessing Garifuna people and attracting tourists to sanitized places, purged of little impurities called “indigenous people”. The Honduras Caribbean Biological Corridor (HCBC), part of the larger Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), is one such example of eco-tourism which uses “neoliberal conservation” to build purified (cleansed of indigenous people) eco-tourist destinations. The Jeanette Kawas National Park, present with the HCBC, covers over 70,000 hectares in Tela Bay and houses the Garifuna communities of Miami, Barra Vieja, Tornabe and San Juan. In this national park, intermittent bans are constantly placed on fishing and the areas of cultivation have also been reduced. In the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area (MPA), similar restrictions have been placed on the extraction of marine life, leading to clashes between the inhabitants of Chachahuate, a Garífuna fishing village, and the state security forces.

In both the instances, the “environmentally conscious” policies of the government have undermined the Garifuna’s primary subsistence strategy i.e. fishing. Apart from being the economic foundation of the Garifuna group, fishing is the main protein source for the Garifuna living in the Tela Bay. Moreover, the limiting of land cultivation in the JKNP shows how indifferent capitalists are to the exceptionally viable agricultural practices of the Garifuna people. According to a local Garifuna individual, “We don’t use fertilizers because we don’t want to offend the earth. What do we do? There is a model of working, it’s called Barbecho. We work five years in one area, then we let it ferment and fertilize, and then we occupy another space. This is why our property is collectively owned. Because we need this space, which relates to our functional habitat … so the cultural and ancestral life we are accustomed to can continue. Rights are collective; there is no private property in our way of thinking.” In order to utterly uproot this anti-capitalist idea of land ownership and use, imperialists are effectuating “green grabs” i.e. the violent dispossession of lands in the name of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Instead of overtly and barbarously displacing Garifuna people from their lands, a green grab strategy uses the ideological integument of nature conservation to viably and ecologically expel them from their lands.

Through the deliberate destabilization of existential paradigms, eco-tourist projects are excluding Garifuna people from the ecologies in which these indigenous individuals are embedded. CA Loperena calls this “Garifuna Otherness” which is “packaged as a good to further the development of the Caribbean coast as a tourist destination. Garífuna subsistence practices, including fishing, are not contemplated within national development imaginaries, since environmental foundations view these activities as a threat to the touristic potential of protected areas and the sociospatial order pursued by the Honduran government.”

The Violence of Palm Oil

Honduras is the biggest exporter of palm oil in Central America. In the last two decades, its production has increased by 560%, making it the third largest producer in Latin America and eight largest in the world. This productivity increase has been propelled by a favorable global context where both demand and supply are consistently ballooning. From 15 million tonnes in 1995, global palm oil production has increased to 66 million tonnes in 2017. In response to this rising demand for palm oil, Honduras too expanded its production, exporting almost 50% of its palm oil. While countries such as China, India, USA and Netherlands indifferently import palm oil for manufacturing cosmetics, soaps, toothpastes and consumer retail food, the Garifuna community in Honduras is paying a heavy price for the production of these goods.

Vallecito, a Garifuna ancestral land in the municipality of Limón on the north-east coast, is an appropriate example for depicting the dispossession and disruption which has accompanies palm oil production. In this area, “the INA [National Agrarian Institute] handed out new titles to new ‘settlers’ who promptly sold them to the palm oil magnates. In this area alone, the Garifuna communities went from owning 20,000 hectares to 400 within a decade.” An important and strategic player in this chain of dispossession was Miguel Facusse, a Honduran business magnate labeled by locals as "the palm plantation owner of death”.

Between 1970 and 1989, Facusse had expropriated a large number of Garifuna lands to plant African palm, a product necessary to sustain his prosperous company Dinant which sold detergents, soaps and foodstuffs. In 1989, OFRANEH started a land recuperation campaign, aimed at retrieving an ancestral plot of 1600 hectares that 6 Garifuna cooperatives had cultivated. After sporadic and violent clashes between Dinant’s private security forces and Garifuna activists, the land was finally granted to the latter in 1989 by INA. But this gain was soon reversed by the 1992 Agricultural Modernization Law that, in a period of 5 years, planted African palm in 28,000 hectares of Garifuna land. The Vallecito region too experienced the pressures of palm oil predation as Facusse again arrived in the Vallecito cooperatives in 1995 and initiated his palm oil violence. The INA, after much Garifuna activism, chose to extend its administrative sinews and in 1995, restored the stolen lands. Not demoralized by consecutive failures, Facusse came to Vallecito in 1997 and planted African palm on 100 hectares of Garifuna land. OFRANEH, in response to this intrusion, took this land case to the Honduran court and surprisingly, was able to expel Facusse from that piece of land.

The constant cycle of dispossession in Vallecito continues till the present-day, despite the fact that a 2012 INA survey had confirmed Garifuna ownership of specific lands and had asked Facusse to evacuate the region. In 2019, it was found that armed groups carrying high-caliber weapons were patrolling Vallecito, cutting security wires, randomly shooting at community members and raiding the beach everyday with motorcycles. The Honduran poet Chaco de la Pitoreta’s poem “Ode to the African Palm”, written a few years back, lyrically expresses the current situation in Vallecito:

You came when we least needed you

and remained longer than we expected.

You displaced the ancestral kapok tree that used to

rise upon my fields

and shook off the maize that filled my plains…

Oh, African palm!

neither white, nor black…

red and bloodied.

You are not from the…peasants

nor from Honduras or Central America.

You are of the looters that ruin us,

of Facussé and his killers.

Challenging Development

With the kidnapping of Garifuna people in Honduras, the thick mystificatory veil of development is slowly peeling off. For decades, the Honduran Garifuna community has been culturally compressed and tyrannized into accepting development. The current kidnappings belong to that concatenation of development-oriented cold-bloodedness. Miriam Miranda, while delivering a speech in New York during the September 2014 People’s Climate March, said that “The time has arrived to question the model of ‘development’ that has been imposed on us in these last decades. We cannot accept nor perpetuate this supposed development which doesn’t take into account or respect nature and the earth’s natural resources...We act NOW against the culture of death that we are being condemned to by the grand corporations of death and transnational capital.” In the current conjuncture, we can’t remain silent on the development which has kidnapped Garifuna people and depredated the entire community. The time has come to challenge development.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published by different magazines and websites such as Monthly Review Online, ZNet, Green Social Thought, Weekly Worker, News and Letters Weekly, Economic and Political Weekly, Arena, Eurasia Review, Coventry University Press, Culture Matters, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Countercurrents, Counterview, Hampton Institute, Ecuador Today, People’s Review, Eleventh Column, Karvaan India, Clarion India, OpEd News, The Iraq File, Portside and the Institute of Latin American Studies. 

Disturbing the Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

The United Nations is an organization in which the main goal is to “maintain international peace and security” and “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace”[1] as a means to those ends. However, what has cropped up time and again, most recently with a 2019 New York Times article[2] focusing on UN peacekeepers in Haiti, is sexual abuse. It’s something that has not just plagued the organization for decades, but has utterly shattered, destroyed the lives of poor women around the world where they lay forgotten, often not seeing justice meted out to the ones who harmed them.

This problem, along with analyzing past and present plans to fight against this scourge, should be examined along with possible solutions. The purpose is not to ‘bash the UN’ in particular, but rather to study the systemic problems within UN peacekeeping and how it can be fixed or at least put on such a path.

Cambodia

In 1991, the UN formed the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) with the goal of “[taking] control of [Cambodia’ government] and [setting] up and run national elections” and to “help bring about a ceasefire between the various warring factions, disarm their forces and repatriate thousands of refugees languishing in camps on the Thai border.”[3] The mission seemed simple and yet problems occurred.

During this time period, there was a large resurgence of prostitution in Cambodia that was fueled by the economy but also the appearance of UN peacekeepers, which greatly increased the numbers from 10,000 in 1990 to 20,000 in 1993 when the UN exited the country.[4]

There were also allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Raoul M. Jennar, then-director of the European Far Eastern Research Center in Belgium, reported that “in the Preah Vihear hospital, there was for a time a majority of injured people who were young kids, the victims of sexual abuse by UN soldiers.” The situation was never handled, though women did come forth with rape and sexual abuse allegations, they were often days or weeks after the fact and so fact-finding and gathering evidence was a struggle.[5]

Besides the time lapse, such activity was openly supported by the chief of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, who argued that the peacekeepers “have a right to drink, enjoy themselves, and chase ‘young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.’” This was in direct opposition to over 100 Cambodians and Westerners who alleged that sexual harassment of women occurred with disturbing frequency in any and all settings.[6]

It was this lax, uncaring, and cold attitude towards prostitution and sexual abuse that would set the tone for the UN’s peacekeeping missions.

Bosnia/Kosovo

In 1992, the United Nations established a peacekeeping force as to “provide security for the flows of humanitarian aid that were flowing into Bosnia from the international community.”[7] Approximately 40,000 UN personnel from a variety of nations were sent to aid in this goal.

Again, sexual abuse reared its ugly head. The Washington Post reported in 1993 that some UN peacekeepers, in visiting a Serb-run brothel, “took sexual advantage of Muslim and Croat women forced into prostitution, according to Muslim witnesses and the local Serb commander.” [8] The spokesman for UN forces in Sarajevo, LTC Bill Aikman, argued that such talk was nothing but “disinformation,” further stating that he didn’t “think U.N. troops could have done that.”

However, this was in direct conflict with eyewitnesses who, when being interviewed by Newsday, stated that in the summer and fall of 1992, they say on numerous occasions “saw young Muslim or Croat women being forced into U.N. armored personnel carriers or civilian cars that followed the U.N. vehicles to an unknown destination.”[9] Apparently the situation was never formally investigated by the UN, with an informal inquiry being dismissed “because ‘there was no grounds for pursuing it.”[10] Such logic is rather strange, deciding that there should be no further investigation because there isn’t any ‘real basis’ to do so, despite there not having been any formal inquiries into the matter.

Some years later, the US House of Representatives launched a formal investigation into the entire situation of prostitution and sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and the full extent of the corruption of the UN was revealed.

The UN’s International Police Task Force was regularly involved at such aforementioned brothels. A raid of three nightclubs was done in November 2000, which found a total of six IPTF monitors in the clubs and it was revealed, according to verbatim statements from five of the women rescued from these brothels that IPTF monitors had been among the clients of these captured women.[11] When discussing the matter, UN officials contradicted themselves by denying allegations that their forces were involved in sex trafficking but “admitted that members of the force were found to have been involved in the use of young girls' services and that sometimes the children were unwilling participants.”[12]

The situation worsened due the fact that there was an active cover-up by the UN of such activities by the IPTF.

David Lamb, a human rights investigator for the UN, tore back of the curtain on the UN’s operations in Bosnia, directly linking it to sexual abuse. He even went so far as to say that:

U.N. peacekeepers' participation in the sex slave trade in Bosnia is a significant, widespread problem, resulting from a combination of factors associated with the U.N. peacekeeping operation and conditions in general in the Balkans. More precisely, the sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Without the peacekeeping presence, there would have been little or no forced prostitution in Bosnia. [13](emphasis added)

The Bosnian prostitution industry was organized in such a manner that there was no difference between victims of sex trafficking or women who had been forced into prostitution, creating a situation where anyone who engaged with prostitutes aided the sex slave trade.

The United Nations, on an organizational level, was completely complicit in the sex slave trade, with Lamb noting that he and others “experienced an astonishing cover-up attempt that seemed to extend to the highest levels of the U.N. headquarters.” Investigators would not only be rebuffed by those they were investigating, but the UN would launch “formal investigations against the investigators while giving no support to the original investigation, a scenario which was not new to the U.N. Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”[14] (emphasis added) So rather than punish the people who were committing crimes, the UN found it easier to harass and intimidate the investigators.

Lamb’s testimony bolstered previous claims. In December 2001, it was reported that the UN “quashed an investigation earlier this year into whether U.N. police were directly involved in the enslavement of Eastern European women in Bosnian brothels, according to U.N. officials and internal documents.”[15] During this time, Lamb noted that “his preliminary inquiry found more than enough evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation,” however it was killed by higher-ups. The UN even argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to point to systemic police involvement, in spite of the previous November 2000 raid.

Such activities weren’t just occurring on Bosnia, but also in neighboring Kosovo. Amnesty International reported within months of UN soldiers arriving in 1999 to aid in the aftermath of the Bosnia-Kosovo war, brothels sprung up and Kosovo “soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution.”[16] The situation persisted over a decade later, with UN forces being blamed for the growth of the sex slave industry in which many under-age girls were viciously tortured, raped, and abused.[17]

The biggest hurdle towards obtaining justice for the women and children who had been abused was that issue of legal immunity. Foreigners that were part of the UN mission, whether as a military/police force or a civilians, had near-absolute legal immunity. Specifically, Article 6 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the U.N.” provides immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure of personal baggage, and in respect to words spoken or written and acts done by them in the course of the performance of their mission, immunity from legal process of every kind.”[18] Thus, the perpetrators of so much horror were never able to be brought to justice.

This only compounded the situation for the victims as not only was there a cover up by the UN, but the legal immunity created a situation in which they would never get to take their abusers to court.

Mozambique

Due to an ongoing civil war, which displaced over six million Mozambicans, the UN was called in an attempt to create a situation where both sides, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique as the legitimate government and the rebels known as the Mozambican National Resistance, could come to talks.[19]

Similar to Cambodia and Bosnia, the very presence of the peacekeepers was argued to have led to an increase in prostitution and while there were investigations which resulted in some soldiers being expelled from the country, not a single one of them was actually prosecuted.[20]

These arguments were later confirmed when then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had a formal inquiry conducted into peacekeepers involvement in child prostitution which found that “after the signing of the peace treaty in 1992, soldiers of the United Nations operation in Mozambique recruited girls aged 12 to 18 years into prostitution”[21] as well as the linkage between the arrival of peacekeepers and growth in child prostitution.

The year UN forces left, 1994, it came out that Italian soldiers were engaging in sexual misconduct with child prostitutes, as young as twelve to fourteen years old.[22] This incident was simply the one which was put on blast. International NGO Save The Children conducted an investigation into the matter of Italian soldiers being involved in sexual abuse.

The report explained that suspicions were raised and questions asked when the Italian soldiers engaged in commercial sex, but the matter became even more serious “when the soldiers started to make a clear request for sex with minors and recruited street children for all kind of services: domestic work (at a marginal fee), shopping, procuring illegal goods for trade and as mediators (pimps) for commercial sex,”[23] with the situation evolving to the point where the Italians had one of their liaison officers act as a mediator between the soldiers and the pimps/girls.

It goes on to note the disposition of soldiers, prices paid, and punishments for speaking out, which should be quoted at some length.

Most girls in the trade were aged between 13 and 18 years. Private conversations with the soldiers indicated that this was because of `more fun and excitement' and due to the fear of AIDS. Rates for sex differed. Generally, the price was 1.00 US Dollar for sex with a condom and $ 1.10 without. Some soldiers started a liaison with girls, and arranged a flat, room or other venue for them for regular encounters. […] The military doctor of the Italian Contingent Albatroz who served in Chimoio from October 1993 till early 1994, got reprimanded by the (Italian) Regional ONUMOZ Commander Mazzaroli when he reported in writing on the developments. In fact, the doctor was to serve till May 1994 in Chimoio and it is believed that he was repatriated to Italy at an earlier stage due to his critical attitude.[24] (emphasis added)

By late 1993, the Italians became so comfortable and lax that the local staff of NGO Redd Barna (presently known in Mozambique as Save The Children), the Norwegian branch of the International Save the Children Alliance, noticed them having sex with minors in uniform, in and on UN vehicles in the city of Chimoio, with houses even being rented for parties and sex.[25]

In response to this, on September 24, 1993 the head of the Mozambique branch of Redd Barna contacted the head of the main organization to discuss the situation. After visiting Chimoio to get first-hand knowledge of the activities of Italian soldiers, the Secretary-General of Redd Barna joined forces with elements of the International Save the Children Alliance resulting in, most importantly, a letter being written to head of UN forces in Mozambique regarding the situation.

This letter was released by the Children Alliance in December 1993, which the very next month, January 1994, was quoted in an independent Mozambique newspaper, specifically that the letter had been faxed from a high official in the headquarters UN Mozambique to the newspaper. The anonymous official even told Redd Barna that this was done because senior UN staff were “making all possible attempts” to hide and cover up the incidents.

This article was subsequently picked up by various outlets including Associated Press, CNN, NBC, and Reuters. In the immediate aftermath, Italian soldiers were confined to their respective bases. On January 26, 1994, the UN Mozambique contingency issued a statement in which they said, in part, that because “no concrete evidence or information was supplied by the initiators of this accusation, it has not been possible to complete the investigation.”[26]

It should be noted here that the language used is far from neutral, by referring to Redd Barna as “initiators of this accusation” it creates a tone where the NGO is seen as spreading rumors and hearsay. It also leads to the question of how they can’t complete an investigation unless concrete evidence has been supplied. One would think that their investigators, given the serious nature of the situation, would actively be looking for such evidence.

An investigative commission was formed by UN Mozambique and actively utilized Redd Barna to aid in its investigation. This, coupled with them having been the main source, along with the Save the Children Alliance, of the situation going public, painted a target on the organization’s back.  This resulted in Italian soldiers intimidating Redd Barna workers, threatening phone calls, telephone lines and the radio network being tapped when transferring fax messages, and feeding disinformation to journalists.

There was a reveal of a civilian-military divide in that on the week of February 18, 1994, the departing UN commander, Lélio Gonçalves, gave interviews where  he actively denied that UN peacekeepers were engaging in “sexual abuse of minors and sneered about [the International Save The Children Alliance’s] and Redd Barna's concern.” It should be noted that such statements were made “while his superior, [the special representative of the UN Secretary-General, Mr A.Ajello], had already confirmed the involvement of [UN] personnel.”[27] In addition, more and more UN staff approached the organization to provide information, yet were often despised and harassed by colleagues and superiors.

Still, after all of that, nothing was done. The actors just moved deeper into the darkness. After the publication of the investigative report, the Italian soldiers simply continued to engage in their sick practices in more hidden and remote locations and senior officers would intimate girls, forcing them to sign statements saying that the Italians weren’t engaging in any wrongdoing.[28]

Somalia and Haiti

The UN mission in Somalia, only lasting from 1992 to 1995, revealed that even when soldiers were caught in the wrong, their respective nation’s militaries wouldn’t mete out full justice.

Belgian peacekeepers accused of torturing Somali children, Italians, of raping Somali women. The Italian situation was so bad that two generals resigned as evidence of torture mounted and a day after photo evidence of an Italian soldier raping a Somali woman were published.[29]

In 1993, a Belgian paratrooper “allegedly procured a teenage Somali girl as a birthday present to a paratrooper. She was reportedly forced to perform a strip show at a birthday party and to have sexual relations with two Belgian paratroopers.”[30] A military court in 1998 sentenced that paratrooper to one year imprisonment (six months were suspended), a fine, and discharged them from the army. Meanwhile, even though the Italian government conducted a commission which “found credible evidence of a number of instances of gang-rape, sexual assault, and theft with violence,”[31] nothing was done to actually punish those troops.

In Haiti, months after international forces arrived in 1994, a number of women’s organizations petitioned the Justice Ministry to investigate the foreign soldiers as it was public information that “several cases of abuse of women and girls by soldiers in several towns throughout the country” had taken place. A former UN staff member even confided that observers had told their superiors in 1995 in Port-au-Prince of “allegations of sexual abuse committed by French and [Caribbean] UN ‘peacekeepers,’ only to be promptly ordered to desist from exploring the claims any further.”[32]

So on one instance we see just what happens when military personnel are subjected to their justice system, in which a slap on the wrist of sorts occurs and on the other we see still the UN covering up and stonewalling investigations into abuse.

East Timor

In 1999, international forces were deployed to East Timor to oversee its transition to becoming a fully independent country and to deal with the Indonesian intervention which consisted of backing guerrilla groups.[33]

Three years into the mission, it was reported at least two soldiers from Jordan had been accused of sexually assaulting an unknown number of boys. When asked if any investigations regarding these allegations had been conducted, the senior UN military observer, LTC Paul Roney, stated that he was unable to answer the question.[34]

The Jordanian peacekeepers were a major problem as “[interviews] by UN investigators [made claims of] Jordanian involvement in several alleged rapes of boys and women.”[35] This was known by the UN administration in East Timor itself, with the administrator Sergio Vieira de Mello, doing his best to keep the matter quiet.

An incident paralleling Bosnia took place in 2003. A UN police force raided an illegal brothel and found 23 Thai women who had been trafficked into the country, some even being underage, along with six UN police officers. The UN made the incredibly weak argument that the officers were just getting massages and didn’t know it was an illegal brothel.

Specifically, the UN’s Acting Deputy Operations Commissioner, Alan King, stated that the officers came “from a country where massage is quite a legitimate business and in many cases here in East Timor massage parlors exist and they are quite legitimate” and there was no indication “that they went there for anything other than a legitimate purpose.”[36]

Just like so many of the other cases, not a single person faced justice. Daily Australian outlet The Age reported in 2006 that “Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anyone to justice for crimes that included sex abuse of children and bestiality.”[37] Hasegawa announced that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards sexual abuse by any and all UN forces would be put into motion immediately.

The abuse of women in East Timor had long lasting impacts. There were approximately 20 cases of children who had been fathered by peacekeepers, however, no national record exists to get a better grasp of the situation.[38] Soldiers had made promises to marry the women, but would simply return to their home countries. The women and children were left behind to deal with being shunned by their community.

In 2003, the UN put out a bulletin putting the entire entity on notice that sexual abuse would not be tolerated, including that exchanging money for sexual favors “or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behavior, is prohibited.”[39] It established that the head of the mission in question would be responsible for fostering an environment in which such activities would be discouraged and prevented, ensuring each staff member would receive a copy of the bulletin to ensure that there is no excuse of someone not knowing the rules, and that a system would be established to report on sexual abuse cases. Still, this would have no serious effect on sexual abuse.

Sierra Leone

To deal with rebel elements in Sierra Leone and aid in the creation of a unity government comprised of the rebels and legitimate government, forces were sent to the country in 1999.[40]

The entire situation amounted to a horror show for the women of Sierra Leone. The Telegraph made known a report from Human Rights Watch.

But it found evidence of sexual atrocities being committed by troops from the regional intervention force, Ecomog, and the UN peacekeeping mission.

Women were used by all sides as chattels, kidnapped from their homes often in rural areas and forced to act as sex slaves for the troops as well as domestic maids responsible for cooking and household chores.

"To date there has been no accountability for the thousands of crimes of sexual violence or other appalling human rights abuses committed during the war in Sierra Leone," the report said.[41]

There was no reprieve for women here, the very people that were supposed to protected them were also the ones raping and abusing the

That same report revealed a number of crimes done by international forces. In April 2002, “witnesses saw a woman apparently being raped by two Ukrainian peacekeepers near the eastern town of Joru. There was no formal investigation into the matter.” (emphasis added) [42] In June, an officer from Bangladesh was accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy, but a formal investigation found results to be inconclusive and the officer was soon sent back to his home country.

During March 2002, UN spokesperson Margaret A. Novicki, stated that the mission in Sierra Leone was going about conducting an ongoing training program for military personnel which focused on women’s rights and the zero tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse and that the military command was visiting sector and contingent commanders to emphasize the need to police soldiers’ conduct.[43] The previous month, however, the a probe from the UN Human Right Council and the UK arm of the organization Save The Children revealed just how much the conduct of peacekeeping forces had deteriorated.

The joint investigation found a major disconnect between what was being said and what was going on the ground. A UN officer stated that “Every soldier, officer has been read and shown the code of conduct; no one can plead ignorance.”[44] Thus, while knowing the code of conduct, peacekeepers still engaged in abuse by exchanging money and food with children for sexual services, paying between $5 and $300 USD. Witnesses “spoke of teenage girls being asked to strip naked, bath and pose in certain positions while the peacekeepers took pictures, watched and laughed. Some are alleged to have had sex with the girls without using condoms.”[45]

There were several incidents of peacekeepers going to extremes in that they would meet with the child’s parents, feigning good intentions, but would leave abruptly, give the parents money to take care of the girl, or even shower the girl with gifts. The victims, on all levels, were the girls. While they were being abused by the peacekeepers, the community would respond by parading and publically shaming the girls in town.[46]

There was a separate inquiry conducted by the UN in late 2002 where it came to light that “there was no encouragement for staff or other persons to report ethical issues to management, nor for that matter is there a particular office or person with whom this type of problem can be discussed,”[47] but there were slight improvements such as the formation of a Personal Conduct Committee to examine cases of misconduct for UN workers, both military and civilian. Yet, it was known that sexual abuse cases were underreported. The Office of Internal Oversight Services found a single allegation of such abuse, but with over 17,000 soldiers, it shows that there are serious deficiencies with the reporting system rather than a lack of cases.[48]

A Human Rights Watch report documented several cases of rape by peacekeeping troops.

A Sergeant Ballah, from Guinea, was alleged to have engaged in the rape of a twelve year old girl according to the Sierra Leone police. The victim was raped in March 2001 “when she asked for Sgt. Ballah’s assistance in securing a ride to Freetown at the checkpoint that he was manning”[49] and even though Ballah went to court, he was simply sent back to Guinea. In a separate case, a Bangladeshi peacekeeper allegedly raped a fourteen year old boy (the rape had ben medically confirmed) and the police began to conduct an investigation, “until the UNAMSIL provost marshal took it over. The provost marshal concluded that there was no conclusive evidence to link the crime to the perpetrator.”[50] The inquiry was conducted haphazardly, with members of the Bangladeshi contingent speaking with the victim, despite the fact that they shouldn’t have been able to, nor did the UN mission even issue the victim or his family an apology, much less provide compensation or note the outcome of the investigation. This lines up with the summary that there was “reluctance on the part of UNAMSIL to investigate and take disciplinary measures against the perpetrators.”[51] Despite setting up a code of conduct and reinforcing a zero tolerance policy, we see that such acts were half-hearted measures given incorrect investigation methods and flat out interference in cases.

The UN even noted that charges against its own personnel and humanitarian workers working at UN camps, such as forcing women and children to provide sexual favors for food, medicine, and relief supplies, were investigated by the Office of Internal Oversight Services but dropped on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence.[52] It seems that the OIOS acts as many internal investigatory groups: covering up incidents and protecting criminals.

Congo

Peacekeepers were sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to aid in the implementation of a ceasefire between several warring factions starting in 1999.[53]

In mid-2002, Human Rights Watch published the report The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, where several acts of sexual assault were recorded. One such incident occurred in December 2001, when a Congolese woman dropped off an eleven year old girl to a Moroccan soldier, who proceeded to sexually assault the girl, but was kept at his post.[54] Though the zero tolerance policy had been in effect and there was an increase in gender awareness training and even a gender advisor, the mission still lacked any training strictly revolving around the sexual violence.

During July 2004 the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services began to investigate a number of accusations, ranging from a child prostitution ring being ran out of a UN airport to Nepalese soldiers raping minors and even allegations of a Tunisian officer soliciting sex from minors.[55] Most of the allegations revolved around the town of Bunia.

The UN seems to have ignored the situation until it reached a critical mass as The Independent obtained documents which showed that in August 2003, the child-protection office sent a memo to the UN’s Congo headquarters “detailing their fears about the allegations of sexual exploitation by [UN] forces. No action was taken.” Children were put at risk as despite allegations of Moroccan troops engaging in “child pornography, organized sex shows and the rape of babies,” they were still sent to Bunia where in 2004 it was found that “19 out of 50 cases of sexual violence against minors in Bunia were carried out by [Moroccan] troops.”[56] By transferring the Moroccan’s despite such extreme allegations, it could be argued that the UN on some level played a role in these sexual violence cases having occurred.

Horrors against the most vulnerable of Congolese society continued unabated. The New York Times reported in December 2004 on a 12-year-old girl, Helen, and a 13-year-old girl, Solange, both of whom were raped by UN peacekeepers who lured the girls in using food.[57]

In January 2005, the UN conducted an investigation into the matter, finding that “Congolese women and girls confirmed that sexual contact with peacekeepers occurred with regularity, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.”[58] Unfortunately, the vast majority of allegations were unable to be substantiated. The Office of Internal Oversight Services complied a total of 20 cases and was able to corroborate only seven cases, as in remaining cases the victims and witnesses weren’t able to positively identify perpetrators.

Shockingly, while this investigation was going on, peacekeepers were still engaging in sexual acts, “evidenced by the presence of freshly used condoms near military camps and guard posts and by the additional allegations of recent cases of solicitations brought to the attention of the OIOS team during the last days of the investigation.”[59]

Out of the report came several recommendations, among them were: to create and implement a prevention program, “establish a rapid-response detection program, utilizing personnel experienced in such cases,” ensuring that UN administrators and officers can demonstrate that current rules and regulations aimed at preventing sexual abuse/exploitation are being enforced, and creating a program to “provide regular briefings for troops on their responsibilities to the local population and on prohibited behaviors”[60] so that everyone, from peacekeepers on up, would be on the same page.

Due to this report, a sexual abuse focal-point element was created for all UN agencies in the Congo, a website was established to educate staff on exactly what constituted sexual abuse/exploitation, and a strict curfew was put in place. In March 2005, the UN Security Council issued a resolution focusing on the Congo, which in part they asked the Secretary General to ensure compliance to the zero tolerance policy on sexual abuse, that perpetrators be investigated and punished.[61]

The UN began looking into the alleged child prostitution ring in August 2006. While many of the patrons were Congolese soldiers, early testimonies from victims revealed that ring leaders became interested in the presence of UN forces and the money they had as a catalyst for creating the ring.[62]

There were further child prostitution ring allegations surround a contingency from India two years later, but the soldiers were found innocent by Indian courts.[63] In another instance of abuse by Indian soldiers, there were allegations that they had fathered nearly 12 children after DNA tests were conducted and showed the children having distinct Indian features. While one soldiers was punished as it was found that his DNA sample matched with one of the children born, others only had administrative action recommended and others still were given a clean slate.[64]

Despite sexual abuse allegations having been on the decline[65], the situation seemed to continue to deteriorate as The Globe and Mail reported that in February 2011, two teenaged orphans were attacked with two Congolese soldiers beating one of the girls, while the other was gang raped and impregnated.[66] The UN soldiers were still out in the field even after the incident.[67]

Overall, there was a complete lack of punishment for soldiers that engaged in abuse and exploitation. The Independent reported in 2007 that nearly 200 peacekeepers had been disciplined in sexual abuse cases since 2004, but not a single one had been prosecuted. In fact, of the 319 people that had been investigated in the 2004-2007 time frame for sexual misconduct, 180 had been either dismissed or sent back to their home countries.[68]

Just for the missions launched in the 1990s, there were cover ups, lies, and even an outright acceptance of blue helmets engaging in abuse. Unfortunately, for the missions that started up in the 2000s, the women and girls of a myriad of nations would be subject to abuse, no more so than in Haiti. 

Notes

[1] United Nations, Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html

[2] Elian Peltier, “U.N. Peacekeepers in Haiti Said to Have Fathered Hundreds of Children,” New York Times, December 18, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/world/americas/haiti-un-peacekeepers.html)

[3] Kevin Ponniah, “In 1993, the UN tried to bring democracy to Cambodia. Is that dream dead?,” BBC News, July 28, 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44966916)

[4] Donna M. Hughes, “Welcome to the Rape Camp: Sexual Exploitation and the Internet in Cambodia,” Journal of Sexual Aggression 6 (Winter 2000), pg 4

[5] Sandra Whitworth, “Gender, Race and the Politics of Peacekeeping,” in Edward Moxon-Browne, editor, A Future in Peacekeeping? (New York, New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1998), pg 179

[6] Anne Orford, “The Politics of Collective Security,” Michigan Journal of International Law 17:2 (1996), pgs 378-379

[7] Globalization 101, Peacekeeping in Bosnia, http://www.globalization101.org/peacekeeping-in-bosnia/

[8] Roy Gutman, “U.N. Forces Accused of Using Serb-run Brothel,” Washington Post, November 2, 1993 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/02/un-forces-accused-of-using-serb-run-brothel/78414de2-36d0-41c0-9081-c3a5ee513078/)

[9] Ibid

[10] Susan Dewey, Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India (West Harford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008), pg 101

[11] U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, The U.N. and the Sex Slave Trade in Bosnia: Isolated Case or Larger Problem in UN System (Washington D.C.: Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, House Committee On International Relations, 2002) (http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa78948.000/hfa78948_0f.htm), pg 47

[12] Ibid, pg 8

[13] Ibid, pg 66

[14] Ibid, pg 68

[15] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Halted Probe of Officers' Alleged Role in Sex Trafficking,” Washington Post, December 27, 2001 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/12/27/un-halted-probe-of-officers-alleged-role-in-sex-trafficking/2e2465f3-32b4-42ff-a8df-7a8108e4b9ee/)

[16] Amnesty International, Kosovo (Serbia & Montenegro) “So does that mean I have rights?” https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/96000/eur700102004en.pdf (May 6, 2004), pg 7

[17] Ian Traynor, “Westerner troops fuelling Kosovo sex trade,” Irish Times, May 7, 2004 (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/westerner-troops-fuelling-kosovo-sex-trade-1.1139448)

[18]Human Rights Watch, Hope Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution, https://www.hrw.org/report/2002/11/26/hopes-betrayed/trafficking-women-and-girls-post-conflict-bosnia-and-herzegovina (November 26, 2002), pg 46

[19] William Gehrke, “The Mozambique Crisis: A Case for United Nations Military Intervention,” Cornell International Law Journal 24:1 (1991), pg 135

[20] A.B., Fetherson, UN Peacekeepers and Cultures of Violence, Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/un-peacekeepers-and-cultures-violence (May 1995)

[21] United Nations, General Assembly, Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children, A/51/306, August 26, 1996 (https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/3b00f2d30.pdf), pg 31

[22] Stanley Meisler, “Prostitution Report Accuses U.N. Troops in Mozambique,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1994 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-26-mn-27378-story.html)

[23] Ernst Schade, Report On Experiences With Regards to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Mozambique, November 20, 1995, pg 13

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid, pg 14

[26] Ibid, pg 17

[27] Ibid, pg 20

[28] Ibid, pg 21

[29] Raf Casert, “In Italy, Belgium and Italy, Somalia peacekeeping scandals growing,” Associated Press, June 24, 1997 (https://apnews.com/deea729ccf6dfe142799ed245261b675)

[30] Ingrid Westendorp, M. W. Wolleswinkel, Ria Wolleswinkel, eds., Violence In The Domestic Sphere (Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt Inc), 2005, pg 15

[31] Ibid

[32] Ibid

[33] Government of Canada, International Force in East Timor (INTERFET), https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/military-history/history-heritage/past-operations/asia-pacific/toucan.html

[34] Ginny Stein, Allegations against Jordanian peacekeepers, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s317953.htm (June 25, 2001)

[35] Mark Dodd, “Hushed Rape of Timor,” The Weekend Australian, March 26, 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20050328014753/https://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12655192%5E2703,00.html)

[36] Nick McKenzie, Claim UN officers customers in East Timor sex slave brothels, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s898377.htm (July 9, 2003)

[37] Lindsay Murdoch, “UN acts to stamp out sex abuse by staff in East Timor,” The Age, August 30, 2006 (https://www.theage.com.au/world/un-acts-to-stamp-out-sex-abuse-by-staff-in-east-timor-20060830-ge3114.html)

[38] Sofi Ospina, A Review and Evaluation of Gender-Related Activities of UN Peacekeeping Operations and their Impact on Gender Relations in Timor Leste. PeaceWomen, http://peacewomen.org/sites/default/files/dpko_timorlesteevaluation_2006_0.pdf (July 11, 2006), pg 44

[39] United Nations, Secretary-General’s Bulletin, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, ST/SGB/2003/13, October 9, 2003 (https://undocs.org/ST/SGB/2003/13), pg 2

[40] World Peace Foundation, United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone Brief, https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/07/Sierra-Leone-brief.pdf

[41] Tim Butcher, “UN troops accused of 'systematic' rape in Sierra Leone,” The Telegraph, January 17, 2003 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sierraleone/1419168/UN-troops-accused-of-systematic-rape-in-Sierra-Leone.html)

[42] Human Rights Watch, World Report 2003, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k3/pdf/sierraleone.pdf, pg 70

[43] Global Policy Forum, UN Takes Action Against Peacekeepers’ Misconduct, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/203/39393.html (March 18, 2002)

[44] United Nations Human Rights Council, Save The Children-United Kingdom, Sexual Violence & Exploitation: The Experience of Refugee Children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/3c7cf89a4.pdf (February 2002), pg 6

[45] Ibid

[46] Ibid, pg 7

[47] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation into sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers in West Africa, A/57/465, October 11, 2002 (https://undocs.org/en/A/57/465), pg 16

[48] Ibid

[49] Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Kill You If You Cry: Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict, https://www.hrw.org/report/2003/01/16/well-kill-you-if-you-cry/sexual-violence-sierra-leone-conflict (January 2003), pg 48

[50] Ibid, pg 49

[51] Ibid, pg 4

[52] Michael Fleshman, Tough UN Line on Peacekeeper Abuses, United Nations, https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2005/tough-un-line-peacekeeper-abuses (April 2005)

[53] United Nations, United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/monuc/

[54] Human Rights Watch, The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/drc/Congo0602.pdf (June 2002), pg 95

[55] Children & Armed Conflict: Impact, Protection, and Rehabilitation Research Project, Abuse by UN Troops In D.R.C. May Go Unpunished, Report Says, http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/childrenandwar/news_abuse_by_un_troops.php (July 12, 2004)

[56] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “Will Congo's women ever have justice?” The Independent, July 12, 2004 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/will-congos-women-ever-have-justice-46938.html)

[57] Marc Lacey, In Congo War, Even Peacekeepers Add to Horror,” New York Times, December 18, 2004 (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/world/africa/in-congo-war-even-peacekeepers-add-to-horror.html)

[58] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services into allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse in the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, A/59/661, January 5, 2005 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/SE%20A%2059%20661.pdf), pg 1

[59] Ibid, pg 11

[60] Ibid, pgs 12-13

[61] Susan A. Notar, “Peacekeepers as Perpetrators: Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Women and Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 14:2 (2006), pg 420

[62] United Nations News, UN investigates allegations of child prostitution involving peacekeepers in DR Congo, https://news.un.org/en/story/2006/08/189322-un-investigates-allegations-child-prostitution-involving-peacekeepers-dr-congo (August 17, 2006)

[63] Kwame Akonor, UN Peacekeeping in Africa: A Critical Examination and Recommendations for Improvements (New York, NY: Springer, 2017), pg 39

[64] Gautam Datt, “Indian army's shame: Indictment of 4 Indian peacekeepers for 'sexual misconduct' on a UN posting in Congo dents the army's honor,” India Today, November 5, 2012 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/indian-army-shamed-action-against-jawan-for-fathering-child-congo-india-today-122447-2012-11-25)

[65] UN News, Sexual abuse allegations decline against UN peacekeepers in DR Congo and Liberia, https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/07/382842-sexual-abuse-allegations-decline-against-un-peacekeepers-dr-congo-and-liberia, July 27, 2011

[66] Gerald Caplan, “Peacekeepers gone wild: How much more abuse will the UN ignore in Congo?” The Globe and Mail, August 3, 2012 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/peacekeepers-gone-wild-how-much-more-abuse-will-the-un-ignore-in-congo/article4462151/

[67] Matthew Russell Lee, On UN Report of Peacekeeper Rape in Congo, Ladsous' DPKO Says Nothing, Inner City Press, http://www.innercitypress.com/ladsous1congorape080712.html (August 7, 2012)

[68] Ruth Elkins, Francis Elliot, “UN Shame Over Sex Scandal,” The Independent, January 7, 2007 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/un-shame-over-sex-scandal-431121.html)

Guns Without Political Education is Like a Journey Without Direction

[Brett Carlsen/Getty Images]

By Ahjamu Umi

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Africans (Black people) everywhere are expressing joy and support for the presence of this Not F – - king Around Coalition (NFAC).  If you don’t know, they are the coalition of armed Africans who have gathered hundreds of armed Africans, mostly men identifying folks, to display weapons and demonstrate symbolic resistance against white supremacy.

The idea is understandable. Five hundred plus years of African people being terrorized systemically all over the world would certainly generate a strong desire on behalf of our people to strike out against the terror we experience.  So, the concept is perfectly valid.  The only question/concern is what the proper response actually is to address our oppression?

The answer to that last question can only be answered one of two ways.  Either we desire to engage in performative actions that make us feel better about the oppression we experience every-day.  Or, we want to figure out how to eliminate this suffering once and for all.

The challenge of this internet/social media based reality we live with today is we all function under the illusion that just because all of us have the same accounts, a computer, and an ability to voice a perspective, it has become normalized for people to believe all opinions matter.  Or, just because someone has the ability to express an opinion in a post, meme, video, etc., that constitutes a perspective where its value is gauged not on the quality of the information within it, but the form in which the perspective is presented.  In other words, form always supersedes essence.  If something looks good, it will get more likes and attention than something with much more substance that doesn’t appeal to us the same way.

As a result, most Africans, and most people overall, are choosing symbolic actions that make us feel better over actual work to eliminate the oppression.  The European woman in Portland, Oregon, U.S. stripping naked and standing/sitting in front of terrorist police makes some of us feel better because for that moment, the police left.  Of course, the gestapo terrorists came back with a vengeance the very next night, probably further infuriated that they couldn’t terrorize as they wanted the night before. This reality hasn’t stopped scores of primarily European observers from praising this individual act. This symbolic act, as if it represents some tangible victory.  This is the surreal reality we face when we know not one less African has been brutalized by state-sanctioned terrorists anywhere on earth as a result of that woman showing her genitals to those terrorists.

By the same token, these Africans come out in the thousands with these guns.  There is no clear plan or idea about how the guns will be used.  And, as someone who has lots of experience handling firearms, I was more than a little squeamish watching the video of the action today, about how careless many of the armed participants were in handling their weapons (and that was before there were reports of gunshots at the action).

Still, more than a few Africans and other goodhearted people were jumping to the ceiling at the sight of these armed Africans, as if this symbolic action was going to intimidate one gestapo cop or white supremacist from their plans to terrorize any of us.  In fact, the videos from today’s events show glimpses of the white right militia members of the Three Percenters present at the NFAC action.  I’m speaking as an activist/organizer who has stood up against the Three Percenters on multiple occasions.  If those Africans permitted those clear white supremacists (their name depicts their racist interpretation of the history of how this country was formed) to rub shoulders with them armed, that’s nothing we should feel any comfort and strength from. 

There should be absolutely no question that guns, no matter how many of them, without organized political education guiding the usage and existence of the guns, is never a good formula.  Guns without political education, like the title says; is like a journey that has absolutely no direction.  We like the guns and the imagery because it symbolizes us having the power to defend our lives, but as was demonstrated when the shots rang out earlier today, the police – the same gestapos we are in the streets protesting in the first place – were able to instantly take control of the day, despite the presence of all of those Africans with guns.  If nothing else, that should show you how its performative and not anything designed to build capacity and strength for our liberation because if it was, we could never surrender our authority to the same gestapos who are killing us.

The final conclusion for us has to be that even if we have a militia of 10,000 people, even 50,000, while the overwhelming majority of our people are not even involved in any organization, that represents no real strength for the masses of our people.  Instead, it has the potential to be a detriment to our forward progress.  Our history is full of examples of paramilitary groups with no political education and clearly this has not worked out well for us.  In Azania (South Africa), we had the Inkatha Movement in the 80s which was mobilized by the racist apartheid regime to use its massive military strength to work against the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, the Black Consciousness Movement, the Azanian People’s Organization, and all the anti-apartheid forces operating there.  This was possible because of the lack of political education which caused people who rallied around Inkatha to believe the talking points that the anti-apartheid organizations mentioned were fronts for outside “communist agitators.”  In the same vein, the U.S. government was able to manipulate the lack of political maturity within our Black power organizations to easily facilitate violence between the Black Panther Party and the US Organization in which a number of Panthers, including Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins were killed on the UCLA campus in 1969.  There are volumes written by those who lived through those experiences expressing dismay at the toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and the use of guns without the level of organization to ensure the masses are being organized to confront the state to seize power (the only logical reason weapons should ever exist for us).
​
Until we get people engaged with organizations, the guns are useless.  We realize that Mao Tse Tung said “power grows out of the barrel of the gun” but his statement should be viewed in the context of the mass organization that his Communist Party in China certainly demonstrated. Without the organized masses – which requires people in organizations – we can’t do anything with guns above just attempting theater to make us feel better about the system continuing to dominate our lives.  At least the good news is simple.  Join some organization working for justice and if you don’t see an organization you feel you can join, start one.  And make sure your organization has a strong political education process.  Once those components are in place, you can add community defense projects that help you train with weapons, but all of that work should always be couched in political education.  Once we recognize this, we can really begin getting to work towards liberation.

Systemic Racism and the Prison-Industrial Complex in the 'Land of the Free'

[Image by Keith Negley via NY Times]

By Holly Barrow

Following the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on 25th May, the world has erupted into protest to demand an end to the vicious racism which continues to infiltrate society. At the forefront of this crucial public discourse on race lies the criminal justice system as it has disproportionately targeted and traumatized BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities for decades.

Systemic racism and inequality is intrinsic to law enforcement in the US, with mass incarceration riddled with racial disparities. From the thirteenth amendment loophole to the War on Drugs, Black communities have suffered exponentially under this facade of ‘justice’, with families torn apart as a result. The War on Drugs is in fact one of the plainest and most brazen examples of heavily racialized laws borne out of a desire to incriminate Black communities. When looking at initial federal sentences for crack cocaine offenses, such inequalities within law enforcement become strikingly clear: conviction for crack selling - more heavily sold and used by people of color — resulted in a sentence 100 times more severe than selling the same amount of powder cocaine — more heavily sold and used by white people.

This is no coincidence and just one example of a system patently stacked against low-income, Black communities. We need only look at some key statistics to recognize how deeply this goes: African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested, are more likely to be convicted and are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. Beyond this, African American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white adults.

In light of such disproportionate arrest and convictions of Black people in the US, dismantling the current prison system - particularly the prison-industrial complex - is key in the fight against racism. The prison-industrial complex describes the overlapping interests of government and industry; essentially, it refers to the corruption at the heart of the criminal justice system in the use of prisons as a mechanism for profit.

This is a system that abolitionists and activists have been attempting to eradicate for decades as it has become increasingly clear over the years that there is a very real and dangerous incentive to incarcerate human beings. With the rise of for-profit prison systems has come further exploitation of predominantly African-American men and other ethnic minorities. With regards to class, this system additionally hurts low-income citizens at a significantly higher rate, with many recognizing the harrowing reality that, in the US, poverty is often treated as a crime.

Poor and minority defendants are typically unable to access the same level of protection and defense as their wealthier counterparts. Similarly, the state recognizes the likelihood of their inability to afford bail, with over 10 million Americans in prison as they await trial on low-level misdemeanors or violations simply because they cannot afford the bail set for them. This keeps prisons filled; a key proponent of the prison-industrial complex.

With police officers incentivized to make arrests as they are aware that police departments will not be funded adequately if there is no motive to do so, and billion-dollar corporations having stakes in the private prison system - from technology such as tagging to hospitality for inmates - incarceration has become a means to generate wealth and boost local economies. This comes at the expense of the most marginalized groups, namely poor people of color.

Regrettably, this line between ‘justice’, ‘protection’ and corporate interest is becoming comparably distorted across immigration removal centers. And again, it is BIPOC who largely fall victim to this. Detention, surveillance and border wall construction have all become big business, with approximately two-thirds of all detainees being held in for-profit facilities. Tech companies have thrived off of tracking migrants, with software company Palantir holding a $38 million contract with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

To provide further insight into just how money-oriented the detention of predominantly vulnerable individuals - such as asylum seekers - has become, we can observe the distressing rise in shares in the largest prison company in the world. Shares in CoreCivic — which runs both private prison facilities and detention centers — spiralled by 40% when Trump was elected as president. This came following his promises to deport thousands and demonstrates a clear recognition that this would see private, for-profit immigration detention facilities boom.

To deny the concerning correlation between incarceration - both within prisons and detention facilities - and investment suggests willful ignorance. The treatment of prisons and detention facilities as money-making machines is of detriment to democracy and makes a mockery of those who hail America as the ‘land of the free.’

In fighting systemic racism, we cannot neglect to tackle the prison-industrial complex. Its roots and very mechanisms are rooted in the oppression of the most marginalized.

Holly Barrow is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service; an organization of immigration lawyers based in the UK and the US

Capitalism, Fascism, and the Tactics of Terror

 (Courthouse News Service photo/Karina Brown)

By Kenn Orphan

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Vladimir Lenin

Between 1973 and 1990 scores of people were disappeared by the US supported fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. They were incarcerated, tortured and thousands were murdered. In fact, the official total of those killed by the regime is just over 40,000. But some critics suggest it was much higher. Pinochet was able to do all of this with the blessing of the CIA who assisted him in the coup against the elected President, Salvador Allende, and in his reign of terror afterward in Chile. The painful lessons of the Pinochet years have often been obscured under neoliberal historical revisionism, but with what is currently unfolding in cities like Portland, Oregon, it is urgent to revisit them.

When Donald Trump’s federal agents rolled into Portland last week, they began to employ classic police state tactics of intimidation. Tear gas was employed, “non-lethal” munitions, and the psychological terror of unmarked vans snatching protesters, and even those simply standing by, off the streets without arrest warrants and whisked off to undisclosed locations. The use of forced disappearance should not be underestimated because it is, perhaps, the most effective tactic at crushing dissent and eliminating political rivals.

Under the fist of General Pinochet, the state became a ruthless force of terror. In September of 1973, at least 10,000 people, many of them students, activists and political dissidents, were rounded up by the military shortly after he took the office of the presidency by a US supported and orchestrated coup.They were taken to the National Soccer Stadium in Santiago where they were subjected to torture or were massacred outright. Thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves. Thousands were never recovered as they were discarded in rivers and even in the Pacific Ocean. Even today, families await justice and the chance to bury their loved ones.

Forced disappearances are a crime against humanity according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. And there is no statute of limitations on this crime. But, as we have seen over the past few decades, the US government and military cares little for the international rule of law. Indeed, it has enjoyed impunity for its atrocities while those who violate these statutes in the Global South are often brought to trial and punished severely. The US invasion of Iraq, along with the occupation and atrocities are clear examples of this. And under Trump, the American Empire has divorced itself even more from international bodies that seek at least some regulation of state excesses or the management of crises. His withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and his recent withdrawal from the World Health Organization during a global pandemic point to a brazen disinterest in engaging with the international community.

Pinochet’s Chile was not alone in its use of forced disappearances. During the Dirty War in Argentina at least 30,000 people were disappeared and murdered by the US backed, rightwing military junta. In fact, under the US implemented and CIA backed and assisted “Operation Condor,” which targeted leftist or socialist political activists, student organizers, and academicians, the entire South American continent became a killing field from the 1970s well into the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, the genocidaire Henry Kissinger was deeply involved in these atrocities in much the same way as he was in Southeast Asia and on the African continent. And he assisted in marrying federal agencies, surveillance and state police, and paramilitary mercenaries and death squads to one another in order to carry out the crimes successfully.

It is not hyperbolic for there to be great alarm over Trump’s use of forced disappearances. Although there have been no deaths because of it, his flouting of the rule of law and use of this tactic of terror is not an accident. And the people under him have proven time and time again that they are ever willing to carry out his orders. As the election looms in November, we should not underestimate the timing of this either. Across the nation protests have arisen to confront the long legacy and continuing ruthlessness of racist, police state violence. The rage has been simmering for a long time, and the murder of George Floyd ignited and galvanized millions to take a stand. To Trump, who is one of the most overtly racist presidents to have taken office since Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt, this represents the greatest threat to his legitimacy.

The US is now leading the world in cases of Covid-19 with over 140,000 deaths. Indeed, the pandemic is currently wreaking havoc on an American healthcare system which was already suffering from disorganization and beholden to the whims and will of merciless capitalist predation. When Trump came in, he literally threw out the handbook on how to deal with global pandemics, so the ongoing protests to police brutality provide him a perfect distraction from his colossal blundering and incompetence.

And of course, there are other ingredients to this recipe for disaster. Trump faces a weak candidate in Joe Biden, who cannot seem to form a coherent opposition to his blatant fascist impulses. If there is no meaningful alternative that represents real change in ordinary people’s lives then, like it or not, the people will not bother to vote. There is also the precarious economic situation, the elephant in the room that few wish to acknowledge. With millions unemployed and facing eviction or foreclosure, the elements of fascism may be coalesced even further. God help us if a climate change fueled catastrophe comes this summer or in the fall, because it will be the perfect storm for him to pull whatever levers necessary for him to quell dissent and remain in power. He has such mechanisms at his disposal thanks to the Patriot Act and the NDAA. He can detain any US citizen indefinitely by merely labelling them a terrorist, thanks to legislation designed and endorsed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And he has already begun branding anyone who opposes his tyranny, like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with that spurious charge.

The uprisings taking place across the US are the stirrings of a global mass movement that shows great promise. That they are taking place in the most wealthy and powerful empire on the planet is an indication that this empire itself is beginning to unravel under the weight of its hubris and a long legacy of cruelty, racism and brutality. But no one should underestimate the tremendous pain a wounded giant can inflict as it falls. Its violence is unoriginal, but it will use the only tactics it knows. And we should remember that it is quite familiar with atrocities because it has visited them frequently on the Global South for decades. Portland is a portent. And, as Lenin inferred in the quote above, things can happen rapidly and in a short span of time. We would be wise to heed these urgent lessons before it is too late.

Childhood and Exodus

By Richard Allen

Originally published at Theology Corner.

…Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3 (NRSV)

The praxis of the linguistic animal does not have a definite script, nor does it produce a final outcome, precisely because it continuously retraces anthropogenesis.

Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature (2015)

By any reasonable metric, I am a bad Marxist. I never finished reading the first volume of Capital. Moreover, my entrance to the Marxist ecosystem came through a circuitous route, beginning with Christian appropriators of Derrida, slowly working through assorted figureheads within twentieth-century critical theory, and settling on the Italian autonomia movement as my base framework. Clearly, orthodoxy is not my strong suit. Likewise, one might also say that I am a bad Christian. I tend to bristle at vehement defenses of objectivity and static truth within Christian discourse. Certainly, it would be unfair to label oneself as “Christian” without basic affirmation of specific theological assumptions. However, suffice it to say, I find inventiveness a far more enticing approach than mere acquiescence to “the way things are.” Truth, at least the sort of truth necessary for spiritual or political liberation, needs more emphasis on radical potential compared to aged rigidity.

One of the underlying questions common to any version of Marxist thought and practice is: how does one exit an oppressive environment? What tools, paths, and ideas aid the quest for liberation? How do we actualize liberation? Furthermore, we see that this question assumes any oppressive environment exists within tangible, fleshly materiality. In other words, even in spiritual or religious contexts, oppression always takes material form, despite any connection to metaphysical or revelatory ideas. It affects our bodies and consciousness. We sense this cognitively and feel it physically. It changes the material nature of our existence. Put simply, if oppression always takes a material form and alters our tangible experience of the world, then liberation will always respond in like kind. If oppression is material, so too is liberation.

Returning to the initial question—how does one exit an oppressive environment?—it seems clear that a turn toward static truth is not necessarily the wisest decision. How can we solely rely upon elements and ideas of old in order to actualize the liberation we seek for oppressed peoples? In my view, a turn toward inventiveness, the process of creating “new” truth by “resting” within the expansive field of pure potentiality (more on this later), carries within it greater capacity for liberation. This is not to say what passes for orthodoxy in any tradition, spiritual or otherwise, holds no value. Rather, at some point we must return to a new understanding of subjectivity and being in our way of analyzing the world so that we can more easily see through the structures which sustain oppression. We must recognize that as conditioned subjects within the ecosystem of late capitalism we learn to make basic assumptions which arguably sustain the very structures that sustain oppression, even if our intention resists that assumption (I’ve written more about this here).

In his latest piece for Cultural Politics entitled “The Aesthetics of Exodus: Virno and Lyotard on Art, Timbre, and the General Intellect” educator and activist Derek R. Ford uses Virno’s analysis of potential, performance, and the “general intellect” in conjunction with Lyotard’s treatment of art and music to describe an “exodus” from subjectivity as such toward a “de-individualized,” fugitive retreat from capitalism. Ford offers an erudite reading of both Virno and Lyotard, and his use of aesthetic theory to ground this fugitive act toward exodus carries great potential for liberative politics. My goal in this response is to expand upon Ford and Virno’s work. As an (informal) student of Virno and the Italian autonomia movement more broadly, I share similar conclusions to what Ford suggests. Say what you will about the sometimes fraught relationship between postmodern thought and Marxism (in this case, represented by Lyotard) or autonomia and Marxism (represented by Virno) there is certainly no shortage of radical, liberative possibilities when these respective traditions encounter each other.

More specifically, Virno’s treatment of infancy and the radical potential inherent to language should be a necessary component of any radical politic. Ford describes Virno’s reinterpretation of the “general intellect” in Marx’s writings as “indeterminate,” preferring instead to read the general intellect as pure potential rather than “particular knowledges and thoughts.” As I’ve written elsewhere, Virno’s understanding of “potential” as an unlimited field of productive praxis—since the linguistic animal speaks but does not exhaust the potential of the speech-act—represents a helpful corrective to aged assumptions common to the most militantly orthodox Marxists among us. In short, by recognizing a space wherein praxis finds its potential before actualization allows for a renewed understanding of how much power we have in the pursuit of liberation or “exodus” (both for the individual and the multitude). If I consciously remain aware that my speech does not ever touch the boundary lines of pure potential, which lies in wait before the utterance, then I can find new ways of living and being through the field of potential, boundless and unformed as it is. However, in order to more clearly see the usefulness of said potential, we must all undergo “desubjectification.”

In Virno’s text When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, he describes the speech-act as ritualistic. “The ceremony of the voice, the occurrence of speech, makes the speaker visible as the bearer of the power to speak” (p. 56). Language is performative, similar to the virtuosity of a musician playing an instrument or an actor transforming into another character. There is something ethereal to the act of speaking, where we enact cultural and environmental rituals unconsciously, expressed through the declarative utterance (“egocentric”) “I speak.” We bring to presence the power of language’s potential as we speak. Additionally, Virno brings the “egocentric” language of children into play just a few pages over, “The child, when verbally announcing what he or she is doing, is not describing an action, but completes a secondary, auxiliary action (the production of an enunciation), whose goal is the visibility of its subject” (p. 63). When one speaks, they perform two tasks: first, they consciously emit vocalized sounds; second, they unconsciously enact “anthropogenesis,” or the production of the subject. This second task, which Virno describes as an “auxiliary action,” is where we find the liberative potential of human language. It is how the subject presents themselves as a subject, or how they “individualize” themselves, which means that behind any form of language (intelligible or otherwise) there lies a space of limitless potential, the potential for speech, which cannot be exhausted. If the multitude understands the power of potential then they can more easily engender new speech to actualize liberation.

Likewise, Ford is correct when, in tandem with Virno, he writes:

Through the acquisition of language, the child is separated from their surroundings through individuation, hence the significance of “I speak.” By learning language, we encounter the disjuncture between the world and ourselves because we discover that we can change the world and that the world can change us.”

Through childhood and the development of our linguistic faculties, we undergo conscious and unconscious individualization, a gradual understanding of our distinction from the world even as we recognize our place within it and its effects upon our life. The problem lies in the ways capitalism forms our respective identities or individualization as we practice the act of speech. This conditioning teaches us prescriptive or authoritative ways of speech which only serve to reify existing structures and assumptions. Thus, while in a general sense, despite these oppressive restrictions upon the way in which the individual speaks under capitalism the individual never truly loses access to pure potential behind the utterance, exodus allows us to retreat from the confines of capital in order to learn new ways of speaking. Because the capacity for speech is limitless, the potential for new language to unlock liberation awaits us, so long as we make an exodus from capitalism. The way out is through a regression of sorts or a “de-individualization,” a return to childhood. In Ford’s words, “As a recursive state, childhood…is the return to potentiality in order to actualize differently.”

Turning our attention toward the biblical text cited above, when asked who deserves recognition as the “greatest” in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus responds with a seemingly odd analogy. Bringing a child to his side, Jesus instructs his followers that “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (emphasis added). At first glance, Jesus’ words seem to refer to obvious differences in societal status (the child being one of the “lowest” members of society) as a way to highlight the necessity of humility when responding to the divine. However, in light of what Ford and Virno suggest in reference to childhood, we see an expanded, materialist vision of the spiritual insight Jesus offers. Childhood is not merely a state of simple humility, although it includes this dimension. Instead, childhood is the closest any of us come to understanding and accessing the pure potential of language. Put another way, childhood is the closest we come to the innocence of simply being human in the world, unburdened by the demands we experience later in our life through capitalist individualization. If childhood is where we learn language, then the only way we can actualize liberation under the confines of the world is to learn to speak differently. In the same way that the only way one can “enter” the kingdom of heaven is to become like a child, the only way we can “enter” liberation is to, in some sense, leave “adulthood” or what passes for our being as we age. I must emphasize that all of this takes place within material form. None of this regression is possible in the abstract. It relies upon the physical and biological capacity to speak.

Thus, I contend, in what I believe to be a shared pursuit of both Ford and Virno, that the only way to liberation is through an exodus of being, leaving behind and stripping away the linguistic assumptions of late capitalism. By returning to a state of being closest to the often untapped potential of speech, we can more easily learn new words, new phrases, and new public utterances which aid the quest for liberation. This process de-individualizes from the world in order to fashion a radical understanding of subjectivity over and against the assumptions made toward subjectivity through capitalism. As Ford states:

Exodus subverts the dominant ideology of individuality by posing childhood as a project that connects the individual back to the general intellect in its potentiality rather than its potential actualizations.

In short, in order to progress, we must first regress and mine the fields of potential we have long forgotten; we must become like children in order to retrace our steps in the pursuit of justice and liberation for all. As mentioned earlier, what passes for orthodoxy tends to reify existing structures and assumptions. Orthodoxy will not save us. We must remake the world entirely, and the only path toward this vision is through childlike inventiveness.

Let us all make the exodus from subjectivity, individualization, and being toward the horizon of pure potentiality, where like children, we have the chance to form ourselves.

The Case Against the Fourth of July

By Ryan Wentz

In 1992, indigenous leaders succeeded in pressuring Berkeley, California to drop the Columbus Day holiday and replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day. Since then, hundreds of U.S. cities and a handful of U.S. states have followed suit. This shift is merely symbolic, but it does reflect a change in how the general public understands American history. Today, in 2020, a national uprising against anti-Black state violence has pushed the discourse into uncharted territory: all around the country, protesters are tearing down statues of notorious racists, from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson. This reckoning is long overdue; American exceptionalism, militarism, and patriotism must be challenged. Displays and celebrations of oppressive structures like settler colonialism and white supremacy must be put to rest. This year and each of the next, don’t celebrate the Fourth of July.

As it was in 1776, the U.S. today is a genocidal, anti-indigenous, and anti-Black settler colony;  the country’s anti-indigenous, anti-Black past has transformed into an anti-indigenous, anti-Black present. The U.S. government’s response to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and national uprising against racist police violence illuminates how little it values indigenous and Black lives. For indigenous communities, coronavirus has been especially devastating. Navajo Nation has recorded more cases per-capita than any U.S. state, and had to sue the federal government to receive the funding that it was promised. Meanwhile, police forces across the country continue to terrorize Black communities. That this global pandemic has not been able to slow down state terror against Black people speaks volumes. In fact, authorities have cracked down harder; police murdered Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among others, during this global pandemic. Additionally, it is stunning to compare how authorities have responded to protests for justice for Black people with protests demanding the U.S. reopen its economy. 

Considering that the Fourth of July is a celebration of the U.S. and its so-called “independence,” perhaps it’s important to relitigate why the so-called “Founding Fathers” fought the British. In his 2014 book, “The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America,” Dr. Gerald Horne asserts that the revolution was in fact a counterrevolution to preserve slavery. At the time, the British empire was inching closer to abolishing slavery, which scared American capitalists who relied on slave labor to accumulate massive fortunes. Thus, the following question must be asked: what is the Fourth of July actually celebrating, if not the creation of an inherently violent settler colony built on stolen land by stolen labor? 

These are the types of difficult questions that we must ask ourselves as we seriously interrogate U.S. history. It may be unpleasant, or even earth-shattering, to reconsider the narrative that we have been told about the U.S. But that is precisely what needs to happen; the public must grapple with the lies that it has been told to justify and uphold white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. 

Every year on July 4th, it is nearly impossible to escape the flag-waving and fireworks. We can, however, reject everything that the holiday stands for and make the choice not to celebrate it. The U.S. government is currently terrorizing entire indigenous and Black communities both inside and outside of its colonial borders; we cannot go on ignoring these crimes.

In Bolivia, for example, last year’s U.S.-backed military coup forced Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader in a country with an indigenous majority, into exile. The coup regime and its supporters are explicitly racist towards Bolivia’s indigenous communities; in 2013, Jeanine Áñez, the unelected leader who has ruled the country since November, tweeted that “I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites.” Additionally, after the coup, its supporters declared: “Bolivia is for Christ.” Many burned Wiphala flags, a symbol of Bolivia’s indigenous majority. In the following weeks, the military massacred at least 18 indigenous protesters in Sacaba and Senkata. Protests against the unelected government continue to this day.

In addition, U.S. support for the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestine illuminates how central anti-indigenous racism is to U.S. policy. In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky, an influential Zionist leader, wrote: “Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population.” Today, as Israel moves closer to the annexation of the occupied West Bank, Zionist leaders share the same understanding. The U.S., meanwhile, enables Israel to colonize Palestine “against the wishes of the native population” by providing its military with $3.8 billion per year, approximately $10 million per day, to continue ethnically cleansing Palestine and entrenching the illegal occupation. 

Just as it has propped up anti-indigenous movements around the world, the U.S. has supported explicitly anti-Black regimes, like in Apartheid South Africa. In November 1973, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA). The U.S., however, neither signed nor ratified the convention. Over one decade later, in 1984, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, declared that “apartheid is an evil as immoral and unchristian in my view as Nazism, and in my view the Reagan administration's support in collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil, and totally unchristian, without remainder.” The U.S., along with its Western allies, was one of the last states to officially cut ties with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In the twenty-first century, the U.S.’s assault on Black lives on the African continent has continued. The U.S. has been meddling in Somalia for over three decades, and continues to drone bomb the country with impunity. Meanwhile, the U.S., with the support of N.A.T.O. and Western-backed rebels, overthrew Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. By 2011, Libya was atop the African continent in Human Development Index; nearly 85% of Libyans were literate, while the average life expectancy hovered around 75. Yet because Gaddafi refused to completely submit to Western imperialists, he was deemed a threat that needed to be taken out. Today, Libya is a collapsed state where Black people are being sold in open-air slave markets.

The U.S.’s horrific treatment of indigenous and Black communities abroad is a reflection of the crimes it has committed against both communities at home. It is essential that we understand that anti-indigenous and anti-Black racism is foundational to the existence of the U.S.; without them, there would be no U.S. empire. Thus, celebrating the U.S. is celebrating anti-indigenous and anti-Black racism. It is celebrating settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, slavery, genocide, and imperialism. Ultimately, what Christopher Columbus represents is no different from what the U.S. represents.

Ryan Wentz (any pronouns) is a Los Angeles-based field organizer for Beyond the Bomb, a grassroots organization committed to preventing nuclear war. Ryan has experience in the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements, and has in the past worked at the American Friends Service Committee and CODEPINK. 

What to the African American is the Fourth of July?

[PHOTO CREDIT: BOSTON GLOBE]

By Christian Gines

I. Every time a firecracker pops I think of every pop of a whip that cracked a back of my ancestor
An uncle or aunt
A cousin
A best friend

Every whip that drove my people
Deeper
*Whip*
Deeper
*Whip*
Deeper
Into oppression
Every whip that moved my parents
One step farther from their homeland
And closer to their new land
A land that’s not really theirs
Where they are a troublesome presence
A land where they are 3/5 of a person
“A slave”
“A nigger”
“A coon”
“A boy”
“A negro”
“A convict”
“A drug dealer”
“A thug”
A
ME

II. Every time a firecracker pops I can hear their fingers pop
The blood seeping out
A paper cut
But from thorns
The same color of the white stuff that they make out of trees 
But the white that makes the white people a lot of money 
The pop that makes me want to complain and get Band-Aid 
But the pop that if they didn’t keep picking then they would be DEAD
I think of the crackling heat of that day
Gleaming on their flared backs
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

III. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the popped naps
The naps from the black panther party that uncurled into an Afro
The naps of my people that remains
Un kept
Un picked
Un bothered
To reflect that we are from our homeland Africa
To reflect that we belong here in America
To show that we shouldn’t be defined by our haircuts or our skin color
To show that when we pick our hair it is a symbol of black power
And that power doesn’t have to infringe on anyone else
For some reason I have to say that
But when you’re accustomed to privilege
Equality feels like oppression
When I pop my knuckles I think of all the black women that struggle with their natural hair 
That need to pop their naps to fit into what society preaches
So they can seem intelligent and smart
So they can be accepted into a society that stresses how they can and should look

IV. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the hanging nooses
The nooses that have my brothers head hanging in them 
That pop
One piece of rope at a time it pops
Waiting on the limb to break
POP
There it goes again
Another black boy dead
When I pop my knuckles I think of the gunshots that go off unexpectedly
One that didn’t have to happen
One that makes another black boy disappear from this earth like nothing ever happens
And when I pop my knuckles I think of
99% percent of those gavels that leave those officers convicted of nothing
And how this criminal justice system fails us
Time and time again
And when I pop my knuckles I think of the moment when that time will stop
And a pop will sound but
It will be a firework of equality and justice
Spreading across the world one by one
On a path that will stop only when that pop is a firework on June 19th not July 4th

V. Every time a firecracker pops I think of Thurgood Marshall and his fight for equality
I think of him hitting his gavel as the first black on the Supreme Court of the United States of America
When I pop my knuckles I think of the jails locked forever
The mass incarceration of African Americans
I think of the closing of MLK’s jail cell and the letters he sent from there
I think of the killings of 
Medgar Evers
Malcolm X

Fred Hampton

Patrice Lumumba
Laquon McDonald
Eric Garner
Sandra Bland
Freddie Gray

Trayvon Martin
Stephon Clark

Sandra Bland
Kaleif Browner

Ahmaud Arbery

George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Oluwatoyin Salau

 VI. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the last poll closing on election night in 2008 
Black people were lynched for this right
I think of the opening of the White House door
And the hope that came with it
The dream that we could become a better America

VII. Every time a firecracker pops I think of Crispus Attucks
The first person killed in the Revolutionary war
A black person
Not even fighting for his own freedom
We have fought in every American war
We are more likely to join the army than any other race
But we're still not seen as American
Yet you still hate us
You brought us over here yet you hate us
We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American.
But like Langston Hughes said
“They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

Yes, the U.S. Response to COVID-19 is a Genocide

[PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Ontiveroz/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Image]

By Alex Harley

Republished from Emphasis Added.

A Yale epidemiologist was castigated for equating the virus to a genocide in a series of tweets. Why? The answer lies in a foundational understanding of white supremacist capitalism: death for profit isn’t murder.

As hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people living in the U.S. protest racist police violence in all fifty states, another act of racist violence is being perpetrated through governmental policy and business practice: The COVID-19 Genocide.

While scientists agree that the virus itself was a natural, and not lab-created phenomenon, its handling in the US is an unequivocal disaster. As of June 29, 2020, the crises is forty-two times the size of 9/11 casualties: 128,000 deaths. So where are the calls for accountability and justice?

It is not despicable to characterize the U.S. response to COVID-19 a genocide. It is imperative. It is an assertion that clarifies U.S. behavior. Unfortunately, MacLeod’s hesitance to call it genocide is no outlier. It is the default reaction from defenders of the status quo.

One British legal authority agrees that the case for genocide is weak, citing “specific intent” (Heieck, 2020).

But it is no insult to victims of state and vigilante violence to call it genocide. It is the acknowledgement of historical record.

The capitalist ideological foundations of the U.S., and all modern states built on settler-colonialism, do not frame death through exploitation as a crime. It’s the price of doing business. They’ve been in excess of deadly business for over four centuries now, and it hasn’t stopped.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder.

But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

- Fredrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England

The (predominantly white) federal government and the (predominantly white) business elites are both guilty of sacrificing working people to profit from and during the COVID-19 crisis. Their (predominantly white) adherents, with their anti-lockdown demos, anti-mask violence, victim blaming, hoax conspiracy theories, and scapegoating of China, are equally culpable.

The rulers of the U.S. do not recognize their own extant record of mass murder: not in illegal military operations; not at the hands of police; not in the workplace; not in the streets. The nation socializes its citizens to normalize systemic murder, successfully. It is a critical piece of settler-colonial ideology. Deception is another key piece.

From “Heroes” to Fodder

Early on in the crisis, front-line workers were heralded for their bravery. They were called “heroes”. But in reality, the fanfare was a just nice way to say “Get back to work!” And this, of course, was reserved for those who weren’t laid off.

Corporations were quick to slash their rosters as soon as the crisis reared its head. The Federal Government acted just as quickly to “bolster the economy” by pouring trillions directly into corporate pockets. Corporations, and especially their rich executives, made out handily.

Between March 18 and April 10, 2020, over 22 million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged toward 15 percent. Over the same three weeks, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $282 billion, an almost 10 percent gain. (Institute for Policy Studies, 2020)

To secure the fortunes of the wealthy, businesses must stay open, with severely reduced staff (and overhead!). Retail and service employees must relent to exposing themselves to infection by interacting with large, diverse segments of the population. They must take on new duties, including enforcing social distancing measures, which exposes them to violent reaction. Doctors and nurses must work without enough equipment, beds, or sometimes even space. And all the while, protests against police violence must be brutally repressed with the billy club, rubber bullet, sound cannon, and tear gas canister. In some cases, the police have directly targeted children and the elderly. And, the police continue to murder civilians.

The connection between racist policing and racist capitalism must be highlighted. They are thoroughly enmeshed.

COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups, CDC

Nationally, hospitalizations show a rate 15 times higher for oppressed nation’s peoples as opposed to whites. The statistics of death rates among them are equally disparate (Ford, 2020).

Race gaps in COVID-19 deaths are even bigger than they appear. Brookings.

Reservations have been some of the hardest hit areas in the nation. But instead of aid, the federal government sent body bags to the Seattle Indian Health Board (Grande, 2020).

What is this brazen attitude, if not dripping with intent? The intent is to make money, whatever sacrifice working and oppressed people must make.

How do you characterize a nation which denies its people access to a functional, modern health system by means of predatory business practices and fiscal austerity? And when centuries of racist capitalist underdevelopment magnify the crisis within the oppressed and working class communities of the US?

This is not by accident, but design. Uneven capitalist development and sheer disregard for human life have proven “profitable” time and time again; and, will continue to do so. Theft and murder are profitable. But who are the murderers? Can we see them clearly?

Responsible Parties

The virus is not the main agent; willful, deliberate neglect is; the result of governmental policies and business operations which have identifiable delegates. There are responsible parties. We must not lose sight of that.

Working solutions were and are available to solve this crisis. This is illustrated by the disparity in how effective certain responses have shown to be across the globe. Nations who took the crisis seriously have fared demonstrably better than the US. They mustered human and material capital to create solutions, during the time they bought through strict containment policies.

Instead, the U.S. flouted scientific consensus and advice from other nations. The U.S. eventually locked down, but did nothing substantial with the time bought. All of the states which re-opened under business and right-wing popular pressure have all surged again (Hawkins, 2020). The infection curve should look like a bell by now; instead, it looks like an insurmountable mountain. And until a vaccine is found, it will continue to do so, if the U.S. ruling class continues its regime of denial.

They withheld vital aid through confiscation of protective equipment and economic sanction. They continued high-tech military operations during a global viral outbreak. In May, the U.S blocked a vote in the UN for a global ceasefire (Borger, 2020). The rulers of the U.S. do not seek peace, but war. War with the world’s oppressed people, domestically and abroad. War for profit.

At every turn, American bourgeoisie will try to make money, no matter how insidious it may seem. As reported by Qiao Collective, US corporation Gilead’s vaccine is slated to cost the American public “$3,120 per [patient] with private insurance.” If China finds a vaccine, they will make it a “global public good” (Qiao Collective, Twitter).

While the ruling class can largely isolate themselves in their lavish homes, padded from infection by layers of workers, the crisis outside is just a complication. The deaths of workers are simply inconvenient, when there is a surplus of unemployed laborers from which to draw. Our deaths truly mean nothing to them. If a guardian‘s charge dies by neglect, it is considered murder. What about when a nation allows its subjects to die?

We should consider it murder.

Taken independently, the historical abuses perpetuated by the leaders and ruling class of the United States are reprehensible. When viewed as a singular phenomenon, they amount to genocide. COVID-19 is just another blood-soaked chapter in the American project of unlimited exploitation.

David Walker's Appeal: Thinking About White Supremacy's Archenemy As We Approach July 4th

[PHOTO CREDIT: AP/NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY]

By Robert Bohm

David Walker (1976?-1830), a free black parented by a slave father and a freedwoman, he was born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, although he left there as an adult to travel in various states. He didn't depart out of boredom or simple restlessness. But because of disgust.

If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. . . . I cannot remain where I must hear slaves' chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers.[1] ("David Walker" 2020)

Eventually, he ended up in Boston. There, he settled down, married and had two children.

Although what we know of Walker biographically is far from complete, we at least know one thing about him with certainty—

By the time he arrived in Boston he was a knowledgeable abolitionist. But he wasn't merely one among many abolitionists. He was on the verge of becoming the author of David Walker's Appeal[2], the most ferocious and multipronged analysis of white supremacy and slavery up until its publication in1829.

In it, he not only laid out a justification for, and a call for, a slave uprising, but also paved the way for future thinker-activists who explored the nature of racial and colonial oppression from what came to be called a psychohistorical standpoint. Such persons included W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon.  

If anyone is relevant to our era with regard to US racism, its history, white supremacy, and incite into, and rage against, the persistence of these things, it is David Walker.

He has something informative to say to everyone recently in the streets following George Floyd's murder.

He also has something darker to say to those who occupy our nation's seats of power.

Contexts

In spite of this legacy, Walker remains one of the least known of the early 19th century's black liberationists. This is in spite of the fact that it reasonably can be argued that no student can grasp the Declaration of Independence's (US 1776) status as an historical document without also reading Walker's Appeal[3] which critiques both Thomas Jefferson's vision of race and the Declaration's role in a racialized America as a white privilege document — one, however, which Walker believed was subvertable by blacks if they employed, in an act of transgressive chutzpah, the Declaration's own words to assault US racism. Which is exactly what Walker did.

In doing so, he instantly turned the Appeal into one-half of a Siamese twins relationship with the Declaration, tying the black freedom-fighter's vision and the white oppressor's vision together forever in all their historical complexity. Consequently, it's impossible for US citizens or anyone else to grasp the Declaration's significance without also reading Walker's deconstruction of it in the Appeal.

That the Appeal possessed visceral power was clear from the moment it was published. Almost instantly, southern officials and other whites responded to it with alarm. As the Appeal's circulation in the south began, a bounty was placed on Walker's head — $3,000 for simply killing him and $10,000 for the more complex feat of capturing him alive, then returning him to the south for (it seems clear) torture and execution.[4] ("David Walker" 2020)

But the money on Walker's head was only one part of the south's enraged response. To reduce the possibility of slave rebellion, new antiblack laws were passed throughout the region while old ones were toughened. Georgia, as an example, passed legislation that made circulation of antislavery manifestos subject to the death penalty. During the same period, in other states from Virginia to Louisiana, laws against teaching slaves to read and write were made harsher, prohibitions against slaves gathering in groups without white oversight were passed, and it was made illegal for freedmen and freedwomen to interact with slaves. Even the Columbian Centinel, a Boston publication, editorialized that these measures were justified to guarantee "The immediate safety of the whites."[5]

The panic that precipitated these responses to the Appeal was triggered by Walker's call to arms in a society already riven by fear of what blacks would do to whites if slaves united and revolted. That there were slaves willing to take great risks and even die in their fight for freedom was something whites knew well, since examples of such incidents were preserved in folklore and historical memory.

One of the first of these incidents occurred in the late 1600s when four blacks were hanged after slaves and white indentured servants joined forces to attack their Virginia owners. Another was the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina during which slaves killed and beheaded whites, then marched toward Spanish controlled Florida in the hope of finding freedom there. And only twenty years prior to Walker's treatise, an 1811 uprising in Louisiana, numbering approximately five hundred slaves at its maximum strength, burned plantations and killed slave-owners, then later, using guns, hoes, axes, clubs and anything else they could lay their hands on, battled two better-armed white militias until the uprising was crushed as the rebels tried to reach New Orleans which they'd planned to conquer.

Closer in time to the Appeal's publication, the 1820s also provided fodder for white worries, particularly with regard to fugitive slaves who, hiding in out-of-the-way places in the southern states, adopted arson as a kind of guerrilla weapon, setting fire to key locations in certain cities, then fleeing[6] and thus stoking white paranoia about the ever-present potential of black retaliation.

‌Another source of white uneasiness during this period was the 1822 slave conspiracy led by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina.

Vesey, a skilled carpenter and freedman, initiated the conspiracy out of a long-lasting hatred of slavery which was further aggravated by the fact that his wife and children were still enslaved. His family's plight was further compounded by a recent change in local laws which made the process by which slaves could be freed more difficult.

Working from these interlaced motives, Vesey recruited an initial group of Charleston slaves (domestics, general laborers, blacksmiths and other skilled workers, etc.,) to become part of the planned uprising. Once this cadre was pulled together, the group further expanded its numbers via secret meetings through which it brought in new members from unrepresented parts of the city as well as from the countryside. The intended insurgence to which these women and men pledged their support was a three-part revolt designed to be both an uprising against and an escape from slavery.

The plan's three phases consisted of the following.

First, on the designated date, July 14, 1822, slaves were to arise in the middle of the night, then slay their white masters and families. Second, those from the countryside were to combine with those from Charleston to take over the city, torch its buildings, kill any whites who interfered, and steal the city's weapons supplies. Third, the rebels were to march as a united force to the city's docks, requisition ships for their use, then sail to Haiti where blacks had overthrown white French colonists two decades earlier.

As reported in the official summary of events, Negro Plot. An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection, the rebellion was quelled a month and a half prior to its scheduled onset. This happened when a Charleston "gentlemen of great respectability" heard of the plot from "a favourite and confidential slave of his" who learned about it from another slave.[7] (James Hamilton, Negro Plot, 2020) When the slave-owner relayed what he'd discovered to the authorities, it set off a chain of events which in a matter of days ended badly for the conspirators. Of the 131 arrested in raids, 35, including Vesey, were hanged as the prime instigators. Others received lesser sentences, and some were acquitted.[8] Also, untold numbers of other committed participants retreated, unnamed and unrevealed, into the silence of their previous lives.

As the court-imposed death sentences given to Vesey and the thirty-four others who were hanged showed, they were sentenced not only for the conspiracy per se, but for their supposed strangeness as Africans, a strangeness perceived by whites as a kind of precivilized spiritual disfigurement which reduced blacks to less-than-human creatures controlled by brutish instincts and prone to crude forms of occultism.

Typical of how this attitude manifested itself in the court's proceedings is the wording of the court's findings with regard to each individual found guilty. A case in point is one Jack Pritchard, aka Gullah Jack, whom the court accused of rejecting "natural and ordinary means" in helping to develop the plot and instead employing "the most disgusting mummery and superstition" to achieve the conspirators' ends. Furthermore, the court found that such behavior could "excite no other emotion in the mind of the intelligent and enlightened, but contempt and disgust" and therefore Gullah Jack should know that no matter what kind of conjuring he practiced or barbaric beliefs he held, "all the powers of darkness cannot rescue you from your approaching fate!"[9]

(It's appropriate to take note here of how different types of othering employ similar forms of demonization. The phrases "disgusting mummery" and "all the powers of darkness" could just as easily be quotes from the Salem witch trial judges in 1692-93 as from racist whites rabid to punish the Vesey conspirators one-hundred-thirty years later.)

Although by the time the Appeal reached the south, the failed 1822 conspiracy, and even more so the earlier rebellions, might seem from our perspective today to have been sufficiently in the past to no longer impact whites, this wasn't the case.

Living in a world in which acts of slave insolence and memories of old slave revolts regularly stirred white society's fears of what black revenge might look like if it succeeded, stories of such incidents, present or past, weren't soon forgotten. Regarding the Vesey conspiracy, the memory of its apparently large size (it was rumored to include thousands of co-conspirators)[10] and massive ambition (its aim was to flee the country for Haiti)[11] still reminded whites in 1829 of their need to always be on the alert and, when necessary, to crush black anger the moment it appeared.

This was the context in which the Appeal's appearance in the south triggered white rage, bolstered antiblack laws and increased vigilantism. What made matters even more enraging for the slave-owning hierarchy was Walker's distribution network, which initially baffled them because of the author's sly use of commercial sailors from the waterfront near his Boston shop to smuggle copies into the south on their cargo trips, then deliver them into the hands of slaves, manumitted slaves and white antislavers.

What grabbed readers' attention — including white supremacists who invariably got hold of copies — about the Appeal was Walker's writing style, a combination of pulpit-pounding oratory, knifeblade-sharp analysis, and a self-confident tone which ranged from insurrectionary to mockery.

Not surprisingly, many slaves and antislavers were moved and/or inspired by the author's rhetoric, whereas bigots and go-alongs loathed it. Even some abolitionists regarded it suspiciously. Many of these believed, as did William Lloyd Garrison, the famous white abolitionist, that the pamphlet's tone was aggressive and promoted violence. 

We deprecate the spirit and tendency of this Appeal . . . We do not preach rebellion — no, but submission and peace . . . We say, that the possibility of a bloody insurrection at the south fills us with dismay.[12]

So, even here, among Walker's supposed allies, there were those offended by the Appeal's fiery style and its call for a so-called "bloody insurrection." What those like Garrison who were offended by this aspect of Walker's argument failed to grasp (or did grasp but refused to support) was that Walker's demand for full equality resembled nothing so much as the Declaration of Independence's proclamation, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive" of people's right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . . it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

Unlike Garrison, Walker understood that he had framed his Appeal in the only way it could successfully be framed in the US—by using the young nation's own words against it. The Declaration, after all, consisted of nothing more than one part of the British population (the colonies) proclaiming war against another part (those living in Britain (the exploiters). That war, which was precisely the type of "bloody insurrection" which Garrison wanted to deny to blacks, ended with the colonies' secession from Britain and their formation into the United States. Although Walker didn't want secession for slaves and free blacks, he did employ the Declaration's formula—i.e., of one part of a population declaring war against another part in the name of freedom—for the purpose of agitating for black liberation from white rule.

David Walker

In this regard, Walker's assertion in the Appeal that it was better to "kill or be killed . . . rather . . . than to be a slave to a tyrant"[13] perfectly echoed the Declaration. For him, the July 4th document wasn't a fantasy about freedom, it was a text which validated precisely what Garrison denounced in the Appeal: the right to "preach rebellion" in order to stir the oppressed (in this case, not the colonies but slaves) to rise up against their tormenters, just as the colonies had done against Britain.

Between Garrison and Walker, Walker's read of the Declaration's implications was clearly deeper and more exploratory.  

Another white abolitionist who rejected the Appeal was Benjamin Lundy whose critique, although similar to Garrison's at a certain level, contained a more noticeable paternalism in the way he expressed his need to "set the broadest seal of condemnation upon" Walker's manifesto and its (according to Lundy) vile tone.

Such things can have no other earthly effect than to injure our cause. The writer indulges himself in the wildest strain of reckless fanaticism . . . It is a labored attempt to rouse the worst passions of human nature, and inflame the minds of those to whom it is addressed.[14]

Lundy goes on to warn all abolitionists against stooping to the arousal of what he labels "malignant passions," then warns antislavery proponents, particularly blacks, against speaking or writing with a lack of decorum.

There can be no impropriety in an expression of sentiment, on the part of the colored people, relative to their wrongs . . . acrimonious language should not be indulged, and even revengeful feeling should be repressed, as much as possible. A disposition to promote turbulent and violent commotion, will only tend to procrastinate the march of justice.[15] (Ibid.)

Although Lundy was a "sincere" abolitionist, he was also a contradictory one. In reading his comments above it's difficult not to spot the archetype of the White Master transformed into the archetype of the White Liberator instructing blacks about how to speak and write correctly. It's an interesting thought: a white member of the language police deciding what defiant slaves and freedman were and weren't permitted to say as they strove to topple slavery.

Walker refused to bow down to such paternalism. Quite to the contrary, he realized the challenge he faced in authoring the Appeal was to name and explicate the reasons behind the black right to revolt against and abolish the slave system, and in doing so to create a language of black insurrection more comprehensive than any so far heard.

To say the least, this was a daring endeavor in 1829 in a country built on racial bigotry where any effort to discuss black rights was experienced by whites (as it often is today) as insulting and belligerent. —in Lundy's term, an "impropriety." Hence, Walker's condemnation by even many antislavers. In the always ongoing language disputes which throughout history inevitably insinuate themselves into politics, to tell the truth about slavery during Walker's time, and well beyond, was, to again quote Lundy, for Walker allegedly to indulge "himself in the wildest strain of reckless fanaticism."

But Walker's real "crime" is that he did his job so well, by writing the most thorough and inspiring antislavery manifesto up until that time. One example of this was the way he anchored his statements about the need for black resistance to slavery with an often folksy simplicity which nonetheless didn't prevent his words from possessing a hard-hitting truthfulness —

it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.[16]

The simplicity of these words is incontestable. Also incontestable is how brazen they are. They announce, in a society in which whites are in all matters privileged over blacks, the slave's right to kill whites, since whites possess the right to kill blacks on a whim or to kill them slowly by starving them of all the nourishments that only equality can provide. This power of the individual of European stock over anyone of African heritage means that a white person is always potentially only one step away from becoming a black's executioner. Knowing this, Walker views a black's murder of a white supremacist as simultaneously a simple act of self-defense and a freedom proclamation.

To understand how explosive Walker's "to kill a man" statement was, we must recognize that it was an announcement of the black freedom struggle's presence in the midst of an array of forces, each of which wanted to crush it. Consequently, it was a announcement of its own survivor status, of its refusal to play dead and pray that one day whites would gift slaves freedom because slaves and free blacks had chosen to abide by Lundy's directive to be polite and therefore should be rewarded. But instead of passivity, what Walker gives his readers in the above statement are thirty words organized into a blunt and simple foundational thought which speaks to the principle of self-determination in a self-determined way.

The black body, Thomas Jefferson, white Christianity

As previously mentioned, Walker referenced the Declaration of Independence in his Appeal on a number of occasions. He did so sometimes in order to make points about the righteousness of slaves' struggle for freedom and at other times as an example of the degree to which most U.S. whites were either too hypocritical or disinterested to acknowledge the contradiction in lauding the Declaration as the nation's founding document while simultaneously denying that slavery revealed a gaping hole in the country's notion of freedom.

Realizing this state of affairs demanded demythization, Walker chose to expose how behind America's swagger and braggadocio, and undergirding its supposed high ideals, was hidden the nation's true source of strength, the foundation upon which it was built: not the Declaration's soaring language, but the black body, available for anything whites demanded of it.

This, Walker understood, was what the American Dream was built on. Following from this, he believed, was that continued subjugation of the black body was whites' raison d'être, which was why they persisted—through either active support (political formations, lynch mobs, etc) or simple indifference to blacks' plight—in conceptualizing freedom as by definition pertaining only to themselves and therefore not relevant to slaves, Native Americans and others of non-European background.

Regarding this situation, Walker's writing bellowed off the page with sarcasm and exasperation in the Appeal when he castigated whites for their self-serving ignorance—

See your declaration, Americans!! Do you understand your own language?[17] (David Walker 1965)

Even here, though, with his tone so caustic, Walker didn't surrender to blind emotion but methodically constructed a well-planned critique, not merely of U.S. racial hypocrisy in general, but against the Declaration of Independence's primary author himself, Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president and a man renowned for supposedly being more sensitive than many whites to slaves' plight. 

Saying about Jefferson that he "was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites," Walker proceeds to eviscerate him for his shallow racial views.

In analyzing Jefferson's racial stereotyping, Walker quotes part of a passage from Jefferson's book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in which the Declaration's author stresses that whites haven't yet found a good reason to consider "the races of black and of red men" worthy "subjects of natural history"[18] (Avalon Project, Notes on . . . Virginia, 2020). To further elaborate this point, the third president admits to having a suspicion

that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.[19] (David Walker 1965)

‌In another area of Notes which Walker also quotes, Jefferson adds to this argument by insisting that when considered historically, the idea of black backwardness wasn't the product of systemic racism but of blacks' biological predisposition—i.e., blacks' "nature." To buttress this perspective, Jefferson compares Africans enslaved in the US (who weren't allowed to read and write) with Rome's' slaves (who were allowed to read and write), proclaiming that Roman slaves were often that nation's

rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master's children; Epictetus, Terence and Phadrus, were slaves,--but they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction."[20] (Walker, Appeal, 15)

Walker lambasts this analysis by identifying the structural weakness at its core: the inherent imbalance of equating educated white slaves with uneducated black slaves. How, he contends, can you compare people living under incommensurate conditions as if their situations were the same and therefore their responses to particular stimuli equivalent?

Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites . . . It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great learning . . . should speak so of a set of men in chains. I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like putting one wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty.[21] (Walker, Appeal, 10)

Clearly, Walker had no tolerance for white supremacist thinking's convoluted nature, no matter how allegedly important the spouter.

But as deeply incensed as he was about this aspect of the race issue, he also was filled with disdain for the young country's sense of white entitlement and what it fed: the nation's duplicity in refusing to apply the Declaration's egalitarian philosophy to blacks. He considered it abhorrent that whites (and too many slaves) didn't comprehend how relevant the Declaration's section on a government's "ends" (i.e., the freedoms and rights it supplies to its population) was to blacks, with its guarantee that

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Although Walker understood that the vast majority of whites would never agree this statement applied to US blacks, he was defiant in his persistence in trying to make the case. He knew, and refused to let go of this knowledge, that if this statement was philosophically sound enough to justify the colonists' war against Britain, it also was sound enough to justify a black war of freedom against the current (white) government and economic system. Walker not only understood this, but launching such a war is precisely what he proposed in the Appeal that blacks do. He also argued it was the only Christian route to follow, since from his revolutionary perspective the majority of those whom he labeled "American Christians" risked their souls by living lives which were the antithesis of Christianity because of how they sowed antiblack loathing everywhere while refusing to listen to blacks' outcries, including his own—

It is a notorious fact that the major part of the white Americans have, ever since we have been among them, tried to keep us ignorant and make us believe that God made us and our children to be slaves to them and theirs. Oh! my God, have mercy on Christian Americans!!. . . .[22]

O ye christians!!! who hold us and our children, in the most abject ignorance and degradation, that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began-- I say, if God gives you peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us and our children, who have never given you the least provocation,--Would he be to us a God of justice?[23]

With white Christianity long ago having spiritually disfigured itself, turning itself into a continent-conquering mass of bible-quoting marauders who viewed blacks and the indigenous as fair game for every kind of white supremacist lunacy, Walker relished the Declaration's insistence on people's right, if a government oppresses them, to rise up and "alter or . . . abolish it."

In only a few words, penned in a moment of historical irony by a slave-owner, the Declaration's announcement that people possessed the right to abolish a government which didn't adequately represent them, Walker discovered a rationale for black upheaval against slavery. Yet finding this rationale was no easy matter, he had to first   do what whites had failed to do: think more deeply about the Declaration's words. After all, what was inferred by terms like "people" and "mankind" in the document was people=white people and mankind=white humans. In such instances Walker replaced such connotations by employing each word's universalist definition—i.e., human beings—and thereby removing reference to skin color. Doing so not only enabled him to use the Declaration's phraseology to include blacks, but also to remind white supremacist Christians of how, once blacks felt sufficiently empowered by this new inclusion, they

will retaliate, and woe will be to them.[24] 

The alternative to such conflict, Walker insisted, was for white Christianity's adherents to reinvent their dead spirituality by turning it into something resembling what it was supposed to resemble: an aspiration toward brotherhood, toward a willingness to accept human beings other than themselves as their equals.

But since no evidence existed that whites in general would make this effort on their own, Walker saw blacks as ironically positioned to potentially be whites' saviors by launching an insurrection that would destroy white supremacy's institutional structures and, in the process, cleanse white Christianity's hatred-fueled underpinnings while simultaneously transforming the Declaration and other national founding documents into something substantively different than what they currently were — i.e., white-settler power treatises.

This vision, coupled with the vividness, cutting eloquence and range of topics that fueled Walker's totalistic critique, makes Walker a ground-breaker in the black liberation struggle's history. As Herbert Aptheker wrote in "One Continual Cry," his introduction to one of the Appeal's editions, Walker's book is

the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States. This was the main source of its overwhelming power in its own time; this is the source of the great relevance and enormous impact that remain in it . . . Never before or since was there a more uncompromising and devastating attack upon the hypocrisy of a jim-crow Christianity . . . Never before or since was there  a more passionate denunciation of the hypocrisy of the nation as a whole—democratic and fraternal and equalitarian and all the other words.[25]

Walker clearly wasn't a cavalier writer, no dilettante with only a casual relationship to the ideas his Appeal expressed. Deadly earnest and devoted to the goal of transforming the U.S. from a nation racialized by white bigotry into one with a political culture that better incarnated the Declaration's ideas about equality than the existing one, he was an activist whose words were intended as a prompt for a specific action — i.e., a revolution against slavery and for equality. That this war was inevitable was a fact of which he was certain.

Although correct in his certainty this war would happen, he didn't know it would take thirty years to arrive, nor did he realize that after the civil war which resulted in the freeing of slaves was over, the battle against racism would still be far from concluded. Instead, the struggle would be transformed. First, it transitioned into a failed resistance to the massive dismantling of black freedoms following Reconstruction, then it evolved into a battle against de facto bigotry in the north and Jim Crow racism in the south. And now today, in the midst of the nation's "post-racist" racism, our streets are teeming with Black Lives Matter demonstrators demanding an end to continued attacks on black bodies.

It is true, of course, that in terms of racism things are better than during slavery. But they're also not. White America's failure to grasp this paradox is the failure that will destroy the nation if it isn't remedied.

We live with, and inside of, paradox.

Epilogue: Consciousness & revolution

David Walker never flinched from the fight against racism nor from the challenge of connecting issues in ways which shed light on problems other than racism—for instance, how an economy and value system that privileged profits above everything else fueled a white racism that transformed black humans into commodities for the purpose of enriching those in power. Walker identified avarice as such a system's primary motivator, writing that because of avarice and the self-importance which accompanies it, such profiteers "murder all before them, in order to subject men to wretchedness and degradation under them."[26]

This was Walker's take on an emerging free market system.

Walker also grasped how a belief system like Christianity, considered sacred by Europeans and their descendents, could be deployed against blacks by those very caucasians as a method of psychological disempowerment. This disempowerment took the form of a generation-to-generation miseducation which bombarded slaves with the "knowledge" that according to God's plan their conquerors were superior, they themselves were less than human, and obedience to their masters was the sole course of action available to them.  According to Walker, this constant white nullification of the value of black life left slaves mired in "abject ignorance," convinced by their masters and overseers "that Heaven has designed us and our children to be slaves and beasts of burden to them and their children."[27]

Walker's insights into the commodification of the African body and the use of Christianity as a psychology-based mind-control tool showed how diverse forces interacted within the institution of slavery to keep blacks oppressed.

The difficulty of penetrating the slave fatalism perpetuated by these realities was Walker's greatest frustration. Making the situation even worse was that no matter where one turned at the time, other forces made the project of turning slave despair into slave rebelliousness even more difficult.

Take popular culture as an example. During Walker's adulthood, one aspect of popular culture was the same as it is today, taking bits and pieces of daily life and turning them into easily graspable entertainments.

One of this process's subgenres during the period 1800-1830 was the production of amusing (to whites) black characters who wore the signs of their alleged inferiority (a "childish" pidgin English, cartoonishly "thick" lips, etc.) as badges of honor. In this regard, one famous image of blacks at the time was a character created by Thomas D. Rice, a white actor who kicked off the minstrelsy trend in 1828.[28] (“Thomas Dartmouth Rice | American Entertainer | Britannica” 2020)The character Rice originated was a would-be black dandy named Jim Crow,[29] whom Rice played in blackface while garbed in raggedy clothes worn in such a way as to give the impression that Crow was less of a dandy than an inept black whose unfounded airs made him, not  a hip fashion devotee, but a farcical illustration of what it meant to be black and out of your league. As Rice acted his heart out on stage night after night, Jim Crow evolved into a living stereotype — a goofy-thinking, lazy, fawning, unintentionally hilarious buffoon.

All this for the pleasure of white audiences, exactly as the doctor ordered! Not only had patrons been entertained, now they "knew" exactly what blacks were supposedly like!

Culturally defined by such stereotypes as well as by intersecting rationalizations (e.g., theological, scientific, cultural) for black enslavement, the challenge of developing a black revolutionary consciousness among slaves undoubtedly seemed impossible at times to Walker and other antislavery activists. Still, in spite of such realities Walker accepted the challenge of breaking through the wall of racist mythology in order to define more clearly how slaves were held back by a worldview designed to guarantee their continued physical as well as mental subjugation.

In one of the book's examples of this problem—i.e., the issue of black identity in a whites-defined society—Walker retells a newspaper story concerning sixty newly purchased slaves who were being transported in a wagon to Kentucky by two guards and a driver. Of the slaves, the males were shackled with iron fetters, whereas women and children remained unbound. During the journey, however, the men secretly loosened their restraints with a chisel, then, when they thought the time right, attacked those in charge, killing, they believed, all three of them. Nevertheless, after the slaves escaped into the woods, it turned out the wagon driver whom they thought they believed dead wasn't dead and regained consciousness. Seeing this, one of the female slaves who had stayed behind revived him either out of pity or from a sense of duty, then helped him escape.

Walker criticizes this slave's behavior, accusing her of accepting her oppressors' view of what was expected of her as a slave—i.e., to protect white power and its needs, regardless of the costs. From Walker's perspective, these costs included not only the endless drudgery of slave life, but also the cost of the slave's acceptance of white supremacy's view of reality as your own. Therefore, the author concludes that the woman's apparently charitable act of nursing the white man back to health is, in fact, a type of self-mutilation. Disregarding her own needs as an enslaved black, she instead clings to her mandated role as a white enabler. In doing this, she fails to see, from Walker's perspective, the moment when the other slaves escape as a moment of potential free action for herself also, a chance to reclaim her identity as a free human being by joining the other slaves' rebellion. Instead, she digs down as deeply, as securely as possible, into the imagined safety of her enslavedness.

By offering this analysis, Walker proves himself to be not merely a promoter of black insurrection, but also a psychologist of such insurrection, of how the "outer" antislavery battle is also an inner psychological one that entails the slave's struggles with the values instilled in her/him by white society. In taking this approach, he foreshadowed W.E.B. Du Boise's work decades later (1877) in developing the concept of black double consciousness. Walker also was the forerunner of another thinker, Franz Fanon, whose book Black Skin, White Masks, pursued similar concerns, particularly with regard to the impact of white colonial ideology and culture on the colonized's consciousness. 

Although Walker understood black liberation would entail in significant part a casting-off of the negative impact of white supremacist values on black consciousness, he also grasped, and in the Appeal expressed his frustrations about, the enormous difficulty of doing so, a difficulty which began with the slave's "animal existence,"[30] a life of unceasing labor and exhaustion, along with the perpetual threat of the whipping post or a beating at the least sign of fatigue or a failure to do what was ordered.  

Although Walker believed that, if his words could only penetrate the slave's propagandized consciousness, he would be able to communicate with a purer, less subjugated place within them, an area of "unconquerable disposition"[31] and stoke revolt, he found his attempts to do this often frustrating and elusive.

This is why the slave who helped the wagon driver escape was a enigma to him. From the author's perspective, the slave's assistance saved

the life of a desperate man, whose avaricious and cruel object was to drive her and her companions in miseries, through the country like cattle, to make his fortune on their carcasses.[32]

Why would she do that? the author wondered.

For Walker, this was the problem in a nutshell. Providing people with information about their selfhood, about their right not to be driven "like cattle" here and there by a white man only so he can "make his fortune on their carcasses"—this information alone, this revelation of their selfhood as free human beings, didn't seem sufficient to arouse significant numbers of slaves to open acts of individual rebellion or to join a group insurrection. This both stumped him and complicated his efforts to communicate his message. Something blocked many blacks, prevented them from internalizing, then acting upon, their right to revolt. Consequently, he writes—  

Oh! coloured people of these United States, I ask you, in the name of that God who made us, have we, in consequence of oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and, in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes?[33]

Although Walker understood that the very fact of enslavement entails not only the surrender of one's body to someone else's control (as well as to the slave system's control), but also the usurpation of that which makes a human being human (e.g., critical thought, freedom of ideas, etc.), he nonetheless was exasperated by it, which is evidenced in the Appeal's many expressions of aggravation with how difficult it was for slaves to extricate themselves from the "wretchedness and miseries"[34] imposed on them by the totality of society — religion, government, the economy, white supremacy's ownership of the word freedom.

Clearly, it wasn't merely forced labor and forced ignorance that comprised the tribulation facing slaves and other blacks. It was also the fact that slavery didn't merely consist of the ownership of black bodies and the extraction from those bodies of wealth-producing labor. It also consisted in the constant reproduction of the very conditions which guaranteed that white supremacy/black subjugation would continue generation after generation via a white power structure and culture, and a slave class shaped by the black codes which spelled out what slaves were and weren't allowed to do.

For Walker, these codes structured black consciousness, providing the slave with a framework for how to view her or himself, since what the slave was allowed to do in many ways constituted who he or she was. According to the codes, slaves were denied, among other rights, the following ones: to testify against whites in court, read and write, marry, gather in a group unless supervised by whites, own firearms, read or distribute antislavery literature, retaliate against white physical abuse, leave a plantation without written permission.

By definition, then, the black self was rooted in the principle of not: not intellectually able, not allowed to (do anything autonomous), not white, not . . . of value, other than as a product owned by a white. The slave's conception, therefore, of right and wrong and, indeed, of who exactly he or she was, was modulated by a whites-imposed system of principles and behavioral restrictions based on the premise that a slave was a nothing, a brute good for only one thing, forced labor.

The way white consciousness is implicated in black consciousness, imbuing it with a self-awareness rooted in a caucasian vision of blacks' essence, convinced Walker that the young country's whites, including the founders, possessed no inclination to extend to people of color the Declaration of Independence's "unalienable rights" principle or the document's proclamation that the oppressed were allowed "to alter or to abolish" tyrannical governments. What whites wanted, he believed, was simple: to keep blacks enslaved, permanently. "The natural love in them to be called masters,"[35] Walker wrote in the Appeal, guaranteed that whites "will keep us in ignorance and wretchedness, as long as they possibly can."[36] (Walker, Appeal, 62)

Given these thoughts, it's not surprising that although Walker believed cultivating a black liberationist consciousness was achievable, he also periodically succumbed to the fear that freeing black consciousness from its colonization by the dominant race's thinking was nearly impossible.

Walker's wrestling with the question of what was necessary to ignite a black uprising in multiple states led to his book's many expressions of despair, as when he noted that too many blacks "yield in a moment to the whites" and this is "the reason the whites are able to keep their feet on our throats."[37] Consequently, he cries out in frustration, "Oh! my coloured brethren . . . when shall we arise from this death-like apathy?--And be men!!"[38] (Ibid.) Another time he writes, "Many of us know no better than to fight against ourselves."[39] He didn't mean here only that blacks sometimes sided with their masters against other slaves, but also that blacks, by internalizing the white power system's worldview, developed a whites-based self-image rooted in the idea that if they questioned white rule, they themselves became the enemy which they had to fight.

It is here, in Walker's exasperation with and fear of what white supremacist thought had done to black consciousness, that Walker made one of his most creative contributions to the philosophy of black liberation. This contribution, unlike his use of the Declaration of Independence to justify black revolution, isn't as concrete, although it is as door-opening. With the Declaration, he recontextualized the original meaning of "all men are created equal" in which by the word man the reader was to understand white man, so that now the word man was redesignated to mean human being. In this other contribution, Walker opened up the door to studying the psychology of racial oppression in ways which hadn't been employed before.

In other words, he paved the way for a revolutionary enquiry that hadn't yet been defined, but was necessary for strategizing black liberation. This is called leaving a legacy.

For Walker, one crucial part of remedying the problem of the debilitating effects of enslavement on black consciousness entails developing a new black self by reincluding in it what's been exiled from it by white supremacy: its own history seen through its own eyes and undistorted by racist assumptions.

In large part, this is precisely what the Appeal is, an anti-story—i.e., a narrative which, once inserted into, or set side by side with, the dominant white story of white superiority, would destroy the notion of that superiority by showing what it did in order to sanctify the myth of its greatness—e.g., the mass murders and use of terrorism to enslave and demonize the innocent for the sole purpose of allowing "those who are actuated by sordid avarice"[40] to rule over the so-called inferior in order to accumulate greater wealth as the result of how "the labor of slaves comes so cheap"[41] to them.

This unearthing of such a buried history is a form of the return of the repressed. As detailed by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, this is a process during which a "tabooed and subterranean history" disruptively resurfaces after a long absence in order to provide us with a fuller history which reveals "not only the secret of the individual" within society during the relevant period "but also that of civilization at the time."[42]

Walker's analysis is connected to this approach in that he views all forms of black anger and frustration at, and resistance to, white domination as signaling the homecoming or return of blacks to themselves from their whites-imposed anonymity within a denied history created by white supremacy's powers that be—pastors, government officials, educators, etc.—as well as by all those who either happily or out of convenience participate in this denial by accepting its righteousness without question.

That this hidden history's return from death by exclusion is an explosive moment for a white supremacist society should be no surprise, since it disrupts the dominant racial narrative and thereby unsettles the status quo's smugness, replacing it with white dread of what comes next. Hence, the hysteria triggered by Walker's Appeal, which was, up until that time, the most comprehensive summation/analysis of the nation's untold racist history, a history which, when made visible, possessed the power to rewrite the traditional fairytale account of American grandeur.

This is what white supremacy fears, the unearthing of the nation's racial anti-story, a reformulation of the nation's history.

Consequently, this is why even today the killing of unarmed blacks isn't confined to a two or three month hunting season, but is instead allowed every month of the year. For white supremacists, this hunt isn't for food, but part of a collective attempt to eliminate as many blacks as possible.

As David Walker understood, a battle against this level of racism can't be won by endlessly waiting for the system to self-correct. Rather, he tells his readers, it rather requires insurrectionists to appear on the scene like "a gang of lions and tigers" whose threatening energy forces the dominant society to realize this is a challenge it can't afford not "to deal with."[43]

Notes

[1] "David Walker, 1785-1830.” 2020. Univ. North Carolina - Education. 2020. https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/bio.html.

[2] David Walker, (Full title) Appeal to the COLOURERED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965).

[3] Walker, Appeal, 75.

[4] "David Walker." Pbs.Org. 2020. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2930.html.

[5] Walker, Appeal, x.

[6] Herbert Aptheker, ed. One Continual Cry: David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), p.34.

[7] "James Hamilton, 1786-1857. Negro Plot. An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection." (Boston: Joseph W. Ingraham, 1822). 2020. https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/hamilton/hamilton.html.

[8] Ibid.

[9] James Hamilton, Negro Plot, 2020.

[10] James Spady, "Power and Confession: On the Credibility of the Earliest Reports of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy." (Virginia: The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 68, April 2011), p. 287.

[11] Ibid.

[12] William Lloyd Garrison. Editorial regarding Walker's pamphlet. The Liberator. Jan. 8, 1831

[13] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[14] “Full Text of ‘Genius of Universal Emancipation.’” 2015. Archive.Org. 2015. https://archive.org/stream/geniusuniversal01garrgoog/geniusuniversal01garrgoog_djvu.txt.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[17] Walker, Appeal, 75.

[18] “Avalon Project - Notes on the State of Virginia.” 2020. Yale.Edu. 2020. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffvir.asp.

[19] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[20] Walker, Appeal, 15

[21] Walker, Appeal, 10.

[22] Walker, Appeal, 35.

[23] Walker, Appeal, 5.

[24] Walker, Appeal, 61.

[25] Herbert Aptheker, One Continual Cry, 54.

[26] Walker, Appeal, 24

[27] Walker, Appeal, 2.

[28] "Thomas Dartmouth Rice | American Entertainer | Britannica." 2020. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Dartmouth-Rice.

[29] Rice's Jim Crow character is the source of the name later adopted to describe the violently racist post-Reconstruction south.

[30] Walker, Appeal, 25.

[31] Walker, Appeal, 25.

[32] Walker, Appeal, 26.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Walker, Appeal, 1.

[35] Walker, Appeal, 61.

[36] Walker, Appeal, 62.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Walker, Appeal, 60.

[40] Walker, Appeal, 3.

[41] Ibid.

[42] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. (New York: Vintage Books, February 1962), p. 15.

[43] Walker, Appeal, 25.