On June 30, 2015 the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, VA, was tagged “Black Lives Matter.”
Tag on the Statue of Robert E Lee, 2015. Photo: Charlottesville Police Dept.
In the ensuing protests against Confederate memorials and other racist statues, only 60 or so came down. Five years later, the protestors in the streets after the murder of George Floyd remember. And from Birmingham, AL, where a Confederate statue came down to Philadelphia where the statue of a racist cop was removed, the monuments are falling. Because these are not “just” statues, they are part of the apparatus of white supremacy. Once more, white people, this is on us: take down the monuments!
WATCH: VIDEO of Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo bronze sculpture lifted off then driven away in truck overnight. It looks as if he’s waving goodbye @FOX29philly pic.twitter.com/hTxH7dqato— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) June 3, 2020
Recall how long this war has been going on. What was called the “war on statues” began in decolonized Algeria in 1962. It spread across Africa and culminated with the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town in April 2015. The decolonizing project crossed over the Atlantic and instigated the statue removal movement in Charlottesville and then across the United States. Last November, statues of conquistadors were dethroned in Chile.
Old Targets, New Tactics
In this rapidly-changing moment, old and new tactics and goals are emerging for the monuments movement. In Richmond, Virginia, protestors tagged statues like that of J.E.B. Stuart (below, a Confederate hero who served under Lee), which was also the model for Kehinde Wiley’s nearby sculpture Rumors of War, notably left untouched by protestors.
Photo via Eric Perry NBC12 (@ericpnbc12)
In a targeted act of erasure, the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization that funded so many of the Confederate memorials, was set on fire. Are you outraged? As long ago as 1963, James Baldwin warned America: “the fire next time.” If the statues had been removed, maybe there would not have been these fires.
LOUISVILLE, KY – MAY 29: A statue of Louis XVI missing his right hand in Louisville, Kentucky. Protests have (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
In Louisville, a protestor removed the right hand of Louis XVI (above). The tag on the statue reads: “All Cops Uphold White Supremacy.” The action and the tag condense a historical understanding of sovereignty in plantation culture into a single image. Let’s unpack this work. The king’s surrogate in the plantation was the overseer, whose hand could be raised to punish or kill. By condensation, sovereignty became white supremacy.
JB Du Tertre, “Sugar Mill with Overseer,” detail, from Histoire des Antilles (1667)
Like the king, the overseer had two bodies: his own, and a second one that never died and never slept. This second body became the emblem of white supremacy. It was, in effect, a statue that sustained the racialized surveillance of the plantation.
In Louisville, Louis XVI as the emblem of white supremacy continues to survey what Black geographer Kathleen McKittrick calls the “plantation future,” which is to say:
“a conceptualization of time-space that tracks the plantation toward the prison and the impoverished and destroyed city sectors”
Kathleen McKittrick “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe (2013): 2
It is entirely consistent that a protest against police brutality would target the statue of the colonizer king. The tag on Louis’s base understands that the cop and the prison guard are the plantation futures of the sovereign-overseer. Removing the hand of the king is an act of what Christina Sharpe calls “redaction,” a gesture that erases in order to make it fully clear what there is to see.
The Cop-Overseer
Attempting to make Frank Rizzo’s statue fall, Philadelphia. 5-29-20.
It was, then, no coincidence that on the same day, protestors in Philadelphia were attempting to overthrow the oversized statue of notorious police officer Frank Rizzo. Given Rizzo’s long history of racist statements and actions, Black Lives Matter had targeted the statue in 2016 and most residents agreed it should be moved. But it wasn’t. The statue resisted efforts to topple it and city authorities rushed to clean it the next day.
Statue of Frank Rizzo removed, June 2, 2020. Photo: City of Philadelphia
Having said that removing the statue was not even in his top 100 priorities, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney reversed course overnight on June 2 and had the Rizzo statue removed. Now it’s clear to Kenney that the statue represented “bigotry, hatred and oppression.” And that this is just a beginning. Finally, a North-Eastern city takes a lead on this issue.
The statue issue has long revealed the hypocrisy of white liberalism, condemning the South while leaving its own hateful monuments in place because they are not actually Confederate monuments. Bill de Blasio in New York failed to take down the Roosevelt Statue and the Columbus Monument, or even to remove a marker placed on Sixth Avenue to commemorate a parade for the fascist Marshal Pétain of Vichy that was only installed in 2003. So now the focus is again on New York. Can the city step up?
Memory matters
The removal of the Rizzo statue shows that who and what is, and is not, remembered does matter, as an extension of the thought experiment “Black Lives Matter.” In a lyric essay published via social media, Oglala Sioux poet Layli Long Soldier was prompted by George Floyd’s murder into a reflection into the “old, yet very present energy” of historical accounts.
White liberals have mostly argued that monuments are history and removing them would erase that history. This view consigns history entirely to the past. The monument as past artifact becomes history just by virtue of not being from now.
But for McKittrick and Long Soldier, they are absolutely “now.” And they defend and project a certain vision of the future as settler colonial white supremacy. For Long Soldier, history does not take stone form:
“we remember who we are from our families, from this land, from stories within the community, and from our senses. Yes, from our senses, we remember what’s stored within us already.”
Layli Long Soldier, “On The Murder of George Floyd: For George Floyd, his family, and for all who are deeply affected” (June 1, 2020)
Her “we” is that of the Indigenous community, not mine. But as she often does, Long Soldier does “ask you, warmly, to return to accounts from our Lakota ancestors.” I take that “you” to be the non-Native reader, who needs to reconfigure their understanding of how past experience can be passed on.
She turns to a reflection on the history of the American Indian Movement, founded in Minneapolis. An early AIM-related action was the spilling of blood-like paint over the doubly-racist statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History in June 1971.
Roosevelt Statue Tagged. Photo: Tyrone Dukes/NYT.
The tags read “Return Alcatraz,” referring to the Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz Island. And “Fascist Killer,” meaning Roosevelt. Six young Indigenous people affiliated with the National Indian Youth Council carried out the action. They’ll be in their 70s now.
The American Museum of Natural History has found time to furlough more than 450 employees already. Let’s make it one more and finish the antifascist action from 1971. Bill de Blasio, reverse the weak decision from 2017 and take this monument down. Along with all the others.
Bird watching in Central Park is the latest thing not to do while being Black. NYC Audubon Society board member Christian Cooper asked his namesake Amy Cooper to leash her dog, as required to protect the wildlife. Instead she saw him, not as a person, but as a type, “African American,” as if it was her observing wildlife. Her racialized seeing transformed his spoken request into a violent assault. As used by John Joseph Audubon, for example.
For there are many layers to racialized seeing. Some racist theory can lie beneath familiar categories, like popular culture or advertising for decades, only to suddenly (re)activate, like the racist association of masks with muzzles used for the enslaved. But natural history is always there, with its concept of a hierarchy of the human. And, yes, even birds.
If there was a long historical irony behind the Audubon Society anti-racist statement defending Christian Cooper, there is also a belated recognition that such basic precepts have to be asserted, by people identified and identifying as white, even and especially from such “neutral” spaces as ornithology, until they are, finally, absorbed. The Audubon Society website glosses over their figurehead’s involvement with slavery. Let’s correct that.
American ornithology can’t be understood without Audubon’s Birds of America, a multi-volume assemblage of enormous color plates and a text mingling natural history with autobiography and travel narrative. Audubon’s is an all-American story of debt, reinvention, violence and white supremacy. Born the illegitimate son of a Jewish servant to a planter on Haiti before the revolution, he became a bankrupt slaver, haunted by the double loss of slave-generated wealth. As his last two enslaved persons paddled him down the Mississippi River to New Orleans so that he could sell them, Audubon was “inspired” to become a bird artist and taxonomist. Like many 19th century amateur naturalists, he invented many more species than are now accepted. Including the fugitive from slavery.
Scenes of Enslavement
Audubon, Snowy Heron 1835
In 1831, Audubon observed what he called the Snowy Heron near Charleston in South Carolina. He saw them in flocks of hundreds of birds. As he observed, they reach as far north as Long Island, where I still see them, only now in twos and threes.
Rice Hope Plantation from the background of Snowy Heron
In the background, Audubon painted a plantation and himself, out shooting birds as usual. The plantation was Rice Hope, in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, where the enslaved cultivated rice. None are to be seen here. Instead, Audubon, oddly masked in modern style, is out hunting. The bird metonymically represents all this: settler colonialism, the Second Amendment, white supremacy, and the invisibility of African American labor. You can buy originals and reproductions all over the internet, teaching racialized vision, one print at a time.
Audubon casually shows how practices of enslavement affected even common songbirds. The blue jay was a prolific species with a habit of eating crops, so that in Louisiana
the planters are in the habit of occasionally soaking some corn in a solution of arsenic, and scattering the seeds over the ground, in consequence of which many Jays are found dead about the fields and gardens.
Audubon did not need to mention that Louisiana planters were slave owners but followed this account with a fantasy entitled “The Runaway,” also set in Louisiana. Audubon imagined that as he crossed the bayous, he was challenged by a maroon, a fugitive from slavery. But from “long habit of submission,” the fugitive at once calls him “master.” They travel to the fugitive’s hideout in a canebrake, a thicket of grasses reaching over 20 feet. Here Audubon hears the story of how the fugitive was sold, following his “owner’s” bankruptcy, as were his wife and children to different purchasers. Determined to reunite, the fugitives escaped but now they lacked food. Audubon’s reverie ended with him leading the fugitives back to slavery, where they were repurchased by a friend.
As so often, Audubon was repurposing his own history. He was the slaveowner who had become bankrupt and sold his people in New Orleans. Perhaps, too, he was remembering vaguely that at the end of the 1811 German Coast Insurrection of the enslaved in Louisiana, the final revolutionaries had been hunted down in the swamps. For him, the restoration of benevolent slavery, as visible in Snowy Heron, was a happy ending. There was no illustration to The Runaway.
Racism and racialized seeing
I don’t suppose Amy Cooper was thinking about Audubon. Any more than she considered that the Ramble–the “woodland retreat” where she let her dog run–was adjacent to Seneca Village, an African American community that was demolished to make the Park.
Seneca Village c. 1850
Seneca Village, though, faces the American Museum of Natural History, which all Park-adjacent New Yorkers have visited. This museum tells a story of racial hierarchy from the Roosevelt statue at the door to the racist “Pygmy” (Mbuti or Twi) diorama on the second floor. I bet you Amy Cooper went there.
As Fanon taught us long ago in reflecting on his own incident of being seen as a “Negro” on a French train around 1950, by the time the person is visually identified and named as a “type,” now updated to “African American,” nothing can stop what will happen. Amy Cooper probably believes she is not a racist. But her way of seeing is and when it took over because she panicked, so was she.
Fascism thrives on chaos, inserting itself into emerging fissures and faults. Not unlike a virus. There are plenty of people doing fascism right now in visual media. And during the pandemic, the social is media. What are the antifascist tactics to disrupt the online fascist wave? No reposting. Whiting out white supremacy. Undermining its claims. And imagining the future.
There’s no way to engage with fascism that has no risk. These are tactics. If they don’t work, then let’s drop them and find better ones. If they do, make them more effective. I’m just not happy seeing swastikas and racist imagery all over my social media.
Fascism is using public space to display its double accusation that stay-at-home policies are Nazism, whose implementation is communism. These small-scale actions have made for a chaos of meaning that has enabled the mass online circulation of everything from Confederate flags to armed takeovers of legislatures and Nazi imagery.
Don’t repost to show how horrified you are.
At a typical “protest” at Commack NY (in Suffolk County with over 40,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 1700 deaths), a small group of reopeners insulted and harassed a local TV news reporter Kevin Vessey. He posted a video to Twitter. Trump then reposted it–twice–with each post getting over 100,000 retweets. If you don’t think that matters, ask Hillary Clinton how she’s enjoyed the last four years.
Beyond the tactical, these images do harm by themselves. During the 2014-16 moment of Black Lives Matter, African American activists reached a point where they no longer wanted pictures of violence distributed. I’ve reached that point with the fascist protests in the US today. It’s just not necessary to see every swastika. It doesn’t help with analysis or resistance and it maintains the sense of chaos that the far-right want to engender.
2. White Out
I’m not advocating just ignoring the violent image. I want to disrupt the chaotic effect they’re intended to cause. Take that appalling image of a white woman standing outside a courthouse in Humboldt County CA, holding a sign that depicted an enslaved African wearing a metal muzzle across the mouth, and an iron collar with a spike. The text was just as bad: “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.”
I don’t want to post that picture unchanged. As a teacher, I’ve long realized that simply showing a racist image does immediate harm. Under the currently existing conditions of white supremacy, the image is downloaded and absorbed at once. To say nothing of the pain it causes. Setting an alternative context, teaching the history, making it look otherwise–that takes time and care.
My simple tactic is to “white out” that image. Whiting out white supremacy. It’s affiliated with other such tactics, like the practice of redaction advocated so beautifully by Christina Sharpe. I’m also thinking of the erasure of lynched African Americans from the photographs in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, as did Ken Gonzales-Day and Mary Coffey.
The last show I saw before everything shut down was the outstanding recent series of photographs by Nona Faustine entitled “My Country,” which feature a bar across American monuments. I am not equal to these distinguished sources, I am aware. This is simply a step to think through how a challenge to visual images claiming white supremacy might be made visually by a person identified as white
I also used all the photograph posted by Kym Kemp (May 16, 2020). You can see that the different protestors made different choices. To the left, a woman chose to use her own sign, not the printed ones handed out. To the right, the drama teacher who features in all the cropped images has folded up her sign and taken the home-made but printed sign. She now claims she was just holding it after somebody else gave it to her but falsely asserts: “I had no sign of my own.” Yes, you did, you just folded it up. It’s almost impossible to notice that when confronted with the violent image.
The point is to be able to create a context in which to see what’s happening and then, if others agree, introduce the context and show the content. But there’s no point in worrying about how the fascists will respond: we know how they will respond.
Should the text be whited out too? Then you get this:
Whiting out white supremacy
It’s a little more surreal. It invites a caption. The original text reveals that white supremacy continues to believe that the enslaved were not human beings, any more than dogs. It rests on the polygenist “theory” that there are multiple species of humans with different capacities. Such ideas circulated widely in the 1850s and ’60s as a defense of slavery. Without the startling image, this nonsense can literally be seen for what it is.
In a classroom, I would work back from the fully whited-out sign to the text and then take a vote as to whether the image should be shown. Then the picture could be introduced as an illustration to the Memoirs of a Blind Man by Jacques Arago (1839), written when the author was in fact blind so could not check the image for accuracy. Then the history of Escrava Anastasia, the woman depicted, who was resistance leader among the Brazilian enslaved, could be shared. Only then would I show the engraving.
3. Undermining
One thing fascists hate is to be made to look ridiculous or to have their claims to power undermined. Montage works wonders at ridiculing the pompous. Most of us can’t be John Heartfield. But deploying memory and simple tools, you can make mash-ups that mock the would-be saviors.
In my example, Mike Pence is visiting the Mayo Clinic. As it’s a medical facility, everyone is wearing masks but not Pence. He’s too powerful to get infected, too masculine for a girly mask, and too divine to need its protection. Photographer Jim Mone depicted him in a gesture of apparent benediction or healing. Most of Mone’s shoot was generic but this photo evoked to me a painting from an older epidemic.
Gros, Napoleon in the Plague House. With VP Pence at Mayo Clinic (Jim Mone/AP).
Baron Gros’ immense oil painting showed Napoleon in a plague house in Jaffa, Palestine. While his officer covers his face to ward off infection, Napoleon reaches out to touch an infected man. The gesture echoed that of the French kings, who would use their touch to heal scrofula, a form of tuberculosis.
It’s good to be a king, in the administration’s mind. But they’re not supposed to make it so clear in what remains nominally a republic. Bonapartism is notorious for appearing first as tragedy, the second time as farce. Pence is a farce and the montage makes that apparent even if you don’t know what the painting is.
Too complicated? Try this. In Texas, some businesses are reopened but not bars. A bar in Odessa TX reopened with some gun-carrying men claiming to “protect” it. When the New York Times ran the story, it led with a photo of a wanna-be tough guy with a tattoo, a bandanna and an AR-15. All the usual “we’re willing to die” rhetoric. This is what actually happened.
Not so “willing to die” in fact. Photo: Eli Hartman, Odessa Advertiser/AP
The original story in the Odessa Advertiser made it clear that this was all an effort to profit and get publicity. No one, in deep Texas, was trying to take their guns. But for all bluster, these liberators were all hat and no cattle.
4. Reclaim The Future
The swastika, MAGA crowd are all about the past. Going back has become code for “go back to militarized white supremacy.” Last time this crowd showed themselves openly at Charlottesville, they were comprehensively defeated but it came at a heavy price: the murder of Heather Heyer. That’s why there are Confederate flags at all the Astroturf protests. They know it’s the second round. They’ll lose again but the cost of human life may be much greater.
That’s why it’s also important to reclaim the future. Mutual aid has been a key part of getting through this first wave, as Rebecca Solnit has chronicled. Since the emergence of the Zapatistas in 1994, an alternative agenda has been clear, including respect for the Indigenous; direct democracy; sustainable economies for human and other-than-human life; health care and other forms of care as the key around which to organize society; production for need not profit; and an end to violence.
The pandemic highlights in bold why we need all this as matters of life and death. Who are we? Pan demos. All the people. The future is pandemocracy. All colonial thought and practice imagines democracy–opposed to the republic–as pandemonium, literally the presence of all demons, and figuratively as a cacophony in which no sense can be made. For the pandemocracy, learning to speak, to connect the visible and the sayable, articulating “that-which-must-be-made-sense-of” (Pasolini) is the work that is collectively at hand.
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran MANDATORY CREDIT. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
The corona virus was supposed to be the great equalizer, a leveler of the divides of race, class and gender. Instead, the invisible pathogen has not only made existing inequalities palpably visible, it has weaponized them. The far-right, last seen at Charlottesville, is back with a new claim: the right (for you) to die. The old settler-colonial slogan “Liberty or Death” has been revamped: “my (white) Liberty in exchange for your Death.” In one week in April, the virus has become racialized.
The far-right activism has followed from a perverse and reverse act of self-recognition. Those white people inclined to an overt declaration of white supremacy became aware that Black, brown and Indigenous people were being disproportionately affected. Hearing this, they concluded that they are immune.
Or more exactly, when “protestors” were asked if they thought the epidemic was real, they agreed that it was but claimed that they were protected by a “higher power.” This phrase comes from the rhetorics of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups rather than Christianity. It was used to carry a double meaning in the familiar dog-whistle locutions of US white supremacy: the higher power is God, manifested as whiteness.
Learning to see in reverse
Let’s track how the “invisible enemy” constantly evoked by Trump became visibly non-white people. In a ten day span, the virus became racialized domestically, congruent with the ongoing xenophobia attached to the disease as being “Chinese.”
It had been predicted in March that minorities would suffer economically. But it was not until early April that media began to report on the disproportionate rates of death and infection in these communities. A wave of reports began in national media around April 7, 2020. By April 17, the Center for Disease Control was reporting that of those cases where racial and ethnic identity was known, 30% of COVID-19 patients were African American and 18% were “Hispanic/Latino.”
A week after this media wave broke, the first “protest” against stay-at-home measures happened in Michigan on April 15. Organized by Trump front groups like the Michigan Conservative Coalition (MCC), the event was quickly co-opted by the far-right. The MCC called for people to stay in their cars. Instead, rifle-carrying men in combat gear posed on the steps of the Capitol. While police might have intervened–imagine this with protestors from the Nation of Islam–this unpermitted, armed action was allowed to continue and garner wall-to-wall media coverage.
Lansing, MI, April 15, 2020.
It was right after a Fox News segment on April 17 covered the event that Trump sent out his “LIBERATE” tweets. As at Charlottesville, the far-right received presidential endorsement, even as the MCC now urges its followers not to attend follow-up Operation Gridlock events later this month. But the Betsy Devos-funded Michigan Freedom Fund, a co-organizer of the event, is still all in, calling the stay at home order “arbitrary and capricious.” The president and a leading cabinet member are conspiring against their own policies in other words.
If Michigan saw assault rifles, two days later on April 17, Denver saw a white woman in a top-end Dodge RAM 1500 tell a medical worker to “go back to China.” Not because he was Chinese, but because social distancing is communism, and the virus “is” Chinese. So it makes “sense.”
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colorado, U.S. April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Alyson McClaran
You just know this woman has 5,000 rolls of toilet paper in her McMansion alongside a freezer or two full of food. While she feels herself to be a brave anti-Communist, she did not in fact dare to walk the streets. The next day in Kentucky the all-white “protestors” chanted “Facts Not Fear,” a Fox News slogan, even as cases peaked in the state.
There is, then, a range of class and political positions among the white activists. What they share is a fear that whiteness is being dissolved in the emergency created by the pandemic. When they say–as they all do–that they would rather work than receive a government handout, it expresses the long-standing belief that welfare is only for people of color and so-called “white trash.” Being required to stay home and receive government funds provokes a furious–if small in number–backlash at being reframed as a dependent person, understood by them to mean a person of color, rather than a “free” person, meaning white. Slavery is never far away in the US.
It has all had an effect. On April 9, 81% of Americans supported stay at home policies, including 68% of Republicans (Quinnipiac). A week later (April 16), Pew Research found 66% concerned that the country would reopen too quickly. By April 19, that support had dropped to 58%, with less than 40% of Republicans in support (NBC News/WSJ). Other polls are close to that number with some as high as 64%. Polls are fickle, and biased, yes. But let’s not presume that a handful of activists can’t change minds, just because we intensely disagree with them.
Facts really don’t have much to do with this. Whiteness connects by emotional cathexis. White supremacy contains a volatile mix of anger, resentment and fear of failure, which is then combined with violence, especially against women. “Lock Her Up,” a slogan again in use at the Michigan protest, remains its watchword. Guns are its iconographic form. Its vocabulary is selectively drawn from the 1776 settler-colonial uprising in defense of slavery, also known as the American Revolution
Breaking the frame of whiteness
What’s at stake now is whether the far-right variant of white supremacy becomes hegemonic over the new conjuncture. Or if something entirely new can be imagined, as thinkers from Gramsci to Grace Lee Boggs, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have long exhorted us to do. It will take what Hall called “a profound cultural transformation” to undehumanize the settler-colony and imagine something different.
Whiteness “works” as an ideology because it provides a frame to sustain contradiction, or as Hall put it:
it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference
Hall, “Gramsci and Us”
Its goal is to make xenophobic white supremacy the ‘common sense’ (which is not to say ‘good sense’) not of politics as a whole but of the right. And, as Hall put it, they have ‘totally dominated that idiom, while the Left forlornly tries to drag the conversation round to “our policies.”‘
To break the frame offered by white supremacy will have create what Arundhati Roy calls “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” It will be both digital and material. A portal is not quite a frame. It that may have edges but not borders. It creates a sense of relation not of exclusion. The intensity of white reaction responds to their sense that that gateway is, paradoxically, now more visible than it has been for some time. How this plays out depends on how the several waves of Covid-19 infection are imagined and configured. I really don’t know what will happen.
Mira Schor, "Untitled (part of an ongoing series of corrective interventions into The New York Times shared on social media since 2017)" 2019.
My body has just become a battleground for the rise of the nationalist right. The Anglo-American governing strategy is to consolidate nationalists and split the left around the figure of the “Jew.” I’m of Jewish descent and I have family in Israel. According to the Trump administration that now means being Jewish is my national origin “on the basis of actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” Really? Which ancestry? The Bukharans who became Jews to get into Russia in the 1860s? Or the unknown Eastern Europeans or Russians who fetched up in London’s East End in the 1890s? Which ethnic characteristics? My nose? My tendency to be sarcastic?
It’s easy to make fun but this is serious business. The Brexit-Trump wave of 2016 has doubled down on white nationalism. This nationalism has updated the neoliberal tactic of attacking your opponent’s strength. It now accuses its opponents of being racist. Not the old racism that it so gleefully parades but a newly invented tradition: anti-Israel racism.
To cover the newness, they call it “antisemitism.” In this worldview, Brexit-Trump nationalists are not racists, they defend the Jewish nation against antisemitism. Meanwhile critics of Israel are racists, so Brexit-Trump nationalists are antiracist. They could care less about actual Jews. They want to split any possible antiracist coalition to govern by executive orders and majorities won with 42% of the vote.
Mira Schor, “Untitled (part of an ongoing series of corrective interventions into The New York Times shared on social media since 2017)” 2019.
Can you be racist against a country? One you don’t even live in? Brexit-Trump nationalism gets around such objections by drawing up a list of rules, not legislation as such, but a “quasi-law.” So to win acceptance, call them by an imposing name. And then claim that everyone already agrees to these rules.
Enter the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and its definition of antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is so vague that it can only be specified by examples. Example number one: “targeting the state of Israel.”
IRHA say you can, in theory, criticize Israel in terms “similar to that leveled against any other country.” Only in practice the new antisemitism police always find any criticism of Israel to be exceptional. Above all, don’t mention the occupation.
The IHRA definition was a key source of controversy in the Labour Party, where it was seen as preventing criticism of Israel. And now it’s been introduced as a benchmark by Trump’s executive order.
A marginal issue? Not if this quasi-law is being used to reconfigure “race” as “nation,” a position very congenial to the right. And not when the UK election will turn on 150,000 votes in marginal constituencies–it’s all margin. The 2016 US presidential election was decided by 100,000 votes across three states, a rounding error.
The small number of Jews that may change votes based on “antisemitism,” actual or invented, is almost irrelevant. Far more significant are those liberals who can be made comfortable with not voting or even voting conservative as an expression of their anti-antisemitism. To say nothing of those whites who can find this supposed antiracist nationalism to be a moral force.
First came the furore in the UK. Boris Johnson, author of casually racist and antisemitic fiction and journalism turned prime minister in the UK has been “shocked, shocked” to find purported antisemitism in the Labour Party. He has hardly had to make the point. A toxic alliance of print and broadcast media with anti-Corbyn Labour MPS has done it for him (see appendix below).
Yes, there are instances of antisemitism in Labour but not because Labour is an antisemitic party. Rather, Britain–especially England–is an antisemitic country.
Now comes Trump’s order to amend the Civil Rights Act with regard to antisemitism. Many Brexit-Trump mouthpieces call now criticism of Israel “anti-Jewish racism.” In this view, they are nationalists, not racists. The Left are racists. This has the further advantage of subdividing the racial category “semite” that includes Arabs and Jews to just focus on Jews. Brexit-Trump nationalism is all about Islamophobia, that’s “priced in,” as they say.
Many assume the goal of Trump’s order is to make support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel illegal. While it certainly does, that’s just a benchmark. The long-term goal is to consolidate an explicitly hierarchical white nationalism, hinging around the pivot of the “Jew,” and frame the “left” as anti-Jewish racists.
Here “Jew” means Israel, where Israel is both a totem for the religious right and the exemplary “racial settler colony” (Ronit Lentin). The goal is to pivot from the long-standing collective position that (to adapt Foucault) “Israel must be defended” to its updated form: “racial purity must be defended.” In both cases, what’s at stake is the racialized nation-state. Today Jared Kushner uses the liberal New York Times as his platform to declare “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” (his capitals) under the headline “Trump’s Order Protects Jews.” As if this invented tradition were accepted fact.
This shift has been happening for some time. The attack on the Democratic Representatives known as the Squad was the start. Ron Dermer Israel’s ambassador to the US already went so far as to cite Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a cause of the Pittsburgh massacre. In this way, the use of imputed antisemitism against those critiquing settler colonialism produces actual antisemitic violence. The push-back against Bernie Sanders by association with the Squad has already started in the Jewish press.
From here, expect that BDS and declarations of loyalty to all that Israel does will become wedge issues first in the Democratic primary and then in the general election. Learn from the UK–facts don’t matter in this debate, endless repetition creates moral panic: over 5400 media articles about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party. It doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to split votes enough to let the nationalists win.
Let’s look at how this is already playing out. The Middle East Studies Association Board of Directors issued a statement at the start of its 2019 annual meeting condemning
“the conflation of criticism of Israeli actions and policies, and of Zionism as a political ideology, with anti-Semitism.”
On the same day, yet more children were buried in Gaza after the latest Israeli bombing. The usual statement “Israel has a right to defend itself” came from Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as if to speak for the triangulating tendency of neoliberalism. But, as part of the new nationalism, Israel has stopped playing by triangulation rules. A few days after Buttigieg and Biden defended the Gaza bombing, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz revealed the whole incident was a sham:
The target had not been re-examined for at least one year prior to the strike, the individual who was supposedly its target never existed and the intelligence was based on rumors.
No one in the “Israel must be defended” lobby, inside or outside Israel, cared. But they know enough to want to prevent others from talking about it.
So is it now “antisemitic,” under the terms of Trump’s order, for me to discuss what has been reported in Israel on my university campus? Can I ask how the right of nations to self-defense has been distorted to justify attacks on occupied territory in conditions of mass incarceration?
When NYU’s spokesperson claims it is “highly supportive [and] deeply concerned about its Jewish community,” does that mean me and others of Jewish descent who are appalled by what is being done in our name? What’s a Jew to do?
This is just beginning.
Appendix: Why the Labour Party Is Not Antisemitic
So many pay credence to these allegations that it’s worth re-enumerating why the idea that Labour is an antisemitic party is wrong and how it was formed:
The number of members alleged to have been antisemitic and subject to a Labour Party investigation represented about 0.1% of the membership.
Between June 2015 and March 2019, eight national newspapers carried a total of 5497 stories about Labour and antisemitism. It’s what Stuart Hall called a “moral panic.”
The great majority of people reported for antisemitic remarks or behavior were not Labour Party members.
For example, of the 200 cases cited by Labour MP Margaret Hodge in May 2019, only 20 related to Labour Party members. This discrepancy was not acknowledged by Hodge, who has continued to give interviews referring to ‘countless’ or ‘thousands’ of cases.
What does white nationalism look like today? It looks like Etihad Man. A 41 year old ex-soldier in Northern Ireland turned civil engineering manager, whose idea of entertainment is physical and verbal racialized violence at the Etihad football (soccer) stadium in Manchester. He embodies how Thatcherism’s Great Moving Right Show turned into Brexit.
Man. Utd’s Fred being hit by one of several lighters thrown from the crowd at Etihad Stadium. Photo: Tom Jenkins/Guardian
On Saturday, as you can see above, Etihad Man was among a reassuringly similar group of (mostly) middle-aged (almost entirely) white Manchester City fans, hurling objects like lighters and water bottles at Manchester United’s Brazilian midfielder Fred, while chanting racist abuse. His team were losing.
Etihad Man outlined at right, 41 year old Anthony Burke
Anthony Burke, outlined above, happened to be photographed and video-ed while making so-called ‘monkey’ chants and gestures at Fred. No one chants by themselves, Burke was simply the most visible of the racist collective. As the video plays, you can lip read him chanting ‘You Black B*st*rd,’ together with the sweet white-haired older woman to his right (our left) and everyone else in shot.
Etihad Man was born in 1978, the year that Stuart Hall first diagnosed Mrs Thatcher’s ‘Great Moving Right Show.’ That movement has brought us to Brexit-Trumpism and doesn’t appear to be finished yet. It is embodied in Etihad Man. He lives in the suburbs. You know he voted for Brexit. He’s separated from his wife. He even has Black relatives. He wrote on Facebook: ‘Listen, I’m only racist c*** because I had a screen shot that made me look it.’ Never mind the video, then.
His well-paid job offers physical comforts. He must have paid at least £50 for his ticket–far more if it was being resold. He’s got a down vest and a nice jumper in case he gets cold. But jumping up and down like a ‘monkey’ will keep you warm too.
That’s actually his defense–he named himself and gave interviews. According to him, he was putting his hands in his pockets. Will it get him off? It might well–he’s out on bail already. But none of the others that share in his psychic rage at the sight of Blackness will be inconvenienced in any way.
For this segment of Middle England, the £50 race riot is the participatory equivalent of being at a Trump rally. Football crowds are self-directed with chants originating from the fans, not prompted by the club. And like the Trump audience, they’re enjoying themselves–only they get to direct their resentments and hatreds at an actual person, right there.
In class-ridden British stereotypes, ex-Army middle managers don’t throw objects and make racist chants. But they do. So while the response has concentrated on excluding one white person, the issue is all these white people in general. Or, more exactly, how does a city go from singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ together in 2017 after the bombing at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert, two miles away, to singing that?
It’s not all of Manchester, I know. But it is less than a week before a general election that has seen the Conservatives’ embrace of white nationalism return them to polling at the 43% level that elected Mrs. Thatcher on three occasions. According the right-wing ‘think tank’ Onward, this election was going to be determined by ‘Workington Man’:
‘an older, white, non-graduate man from the North of England, with strong rugby league traditions and a tendency to vote Labour.’
Almost immediately dismissed, Workington Man faded quickly and the alleged report is not to be found online anymore. But Etihad Man is all too real. Burke works for the Kier Group, a construction conglomerate who made £124 million declared profit on £4.5 billion revenues in financial year 2018-19.
Their webpage entitled “Quality, Diversity, Inclusion” features a group photograph of all white men in hard hats and hi-vis vests, cheering at the camera, as if a goal has been scored:
This idea of inclusion brings together the white nationalism of the football crowd with the Brexit-y uniform of the Yellow Vest. That’s right, the anti-Europeans have appropriated a European symbol of anti-austerity to indicate their support for the UK’s Brexit party of austerity.
Kier do quietly admit:
“We know things aren’t perfect yet – for example, we would like to see a greater number of women and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds fully represented in our organisation.”
One would be a start.
Etihad Man takes his whites-only football culture from work to football and back again. It doesn’t trouble him that his stadium is named after the airline of the United Arab Emirates, whose money has turned Manchester City from an also-ran into one of the top clubs in Europe. I wouldn’t turn up at the Etihad in a keffiyeh though, let alone a hijab.
The response from organized football has been to call for Burke to be banned and for ‘education.’ But Kick It Out, the official anti-racism group, make the limitations of this approach visible on their home page.
While there are three visibly Black British men in this banner, they are all cropped by the frame. Only the young Black woman at bottom left can be fully seen. Meanwhile five white people, including England captain Harry Kane, can be fully seen with two more cropped. It’s a step up from the Kier Group but not very far.
For Etihad Man loves Harry Kane, the white English center forward, wearing the Cross of St George beloved of white nationalists. Etihad Man might be part of England Away, the notorious England traveling fans who routinely vandalize European cities while drunk on cheap beer. He was definitely part of the Army in Northern Ireland, where he served with the Cheshire Regiment.
Etihad Man is already old news. Today’s headline in the Manchester Evening News is a ‘black alert’–it means that a local hospital can no longer guarantee patient safety because it’s so overcrowded. Did no one think for a minute about that name? More work for Kier Group, perhaps–they are in the top three health construction firms. All the people depicted on their Health webpage are visibly white.
Kwame Nrumah in "Transfigured Night" by John Akomfrah.
Kwame Nkrumah in “Transfigured Night” by John Akomfrah.
In transfigured night, hear the poet Milton sing “Hail, horrors, hail.” In this disjuncture, in the break and in the wake, the voice of Kwame Nkrumah comes: “We face neither East nor West, we face forward.” We, the would-be decolonized, was his formula in that betrayed beginning of Bandung, whose spirit continues to inspire. His phrase was as resonant for feminists in Iran as African American activists. To face forward is a positioning against racial capitalism, a setting of direction toward the dismantling of its infrastructures. Toward imagining decoloniality.
This place will document my efforts to face forward in order to engage with race as infrastructure, looking at monuments, museums and other display as constitutive of urban form under racial capital. By the same token, the segregated and unequal distribution of services and infrastructure within cities also requires what Shane Brennan has called “visionary infrastructure,” on the model of Grace Lee Bogg’s visionary organizing.
And Nkrumah’s voice comes again in Transfigured Night, reminding his listeners that they are free. But they’re not and he knows it and so do they. He’s asking them to remember the future. That time when there will have been what he called the “total liberation of Africa,” when the infrastructures of racial capitalism have been erased.
Forward is, then, at once a direction towards possession of the self, which is what freedom has meant in the Atlantic world; the formation of a communal sense of being decolonized; and a relation to time that is neither the progress touted by white liberalism nor the revanchism of reaction but a cosmology that relates human and non-human over the span of many lives. That’s not yet. Decoloniality is the future to be remembered.
Frantz Fanon in Accra, Ghana, 1958.
Then Fanon’s words appear: “O my body, make me a person who asks questions.” What questions does the body ask? In Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah’s two-screen installation Transfigured Night (2015) at the New Museum last summer, where I was thinking all this, it is asked: how did this narcoleptic state happen? How would the disalienation, Fanon’s term, of the body, yours or mine, happen?
Here are some of my questions, now. Has there not been a certain narcolepsy since 11/9, a certain sheltering in place, a certain discombobulation under the constant stream of tweets, executive orders and deregulation that has made it hard to know which way I have been facing? Against, yes. Forward, not always. Is it not now past question that no single moment, whether of voting or direct action, is likely to shift the global direction to authoritarian white nationalism? The city feels restive. Movement in the shadows. An awakening, or better, re-awakening is at hand.
Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”
On the screens now, monuments. Lincoln. Washington. Visited by the heads of decolonized states in Technicolor archive footage, the remembered brightness of past possibility. Transfigured into the blue-steeled glass of the corporate present. Figures still face forward but Washington’s “liberty” and Lincoln’s “emancipation” are no more present than Nkrumah’s “decolonization,” specters all. But specters return, they are the future, they remember it.
What, then, of the Indigenous whose land was taken for these monuments, whose loss is the infrastructure across the Americas? The territorial acknowledgement has become widespread, as it is in Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. As those countries’ histories suggest, it is not enough. Land redistribution in South Africa was one of Trump’s racist panics in the past election. White nationalists cheered, globally. What, too, of those Cheyenne-Arapaho writer Tommy Orange calls “urban Indians,” seven out of ten of the Indigenous population?
Still: John Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night”
Akomfrah ends his installation at what he calls “beginning”. His figure, an African elder, faces forward to the emptiness of gentrified Seattle. The material infrastructure of white supremacy. Race as infrastructure is a set of assemblages that articulate colonial race theory, history as colonial destiny, and the exploitation of labor, made “normal” by what Fanon understood as “the aesthetic of respect for the established order.” The museums. The monuments. The new housing developments with their token “public art” and “parks.” It needs to be articulated as an assemblage, together.
At the foot of the towers, from Luanda to London, Cape Town to Charlottesville, global cities are still networked by what Fanon saw to be “a compartmentalized, manichean, immobile world: the world of statues.” Stone colonialism looks down on people and claims dominance, hierarchy, history, via white supremacy, whether from its towers or from a pedestal. They look down. We look forward. The statues are a weakness, too obvious, too contemptuous. When they fall, it is just the beginning.
Their strategy is still to compartmentalize, to contextualize and to prevaricate. They say: Let’s think about adding a sign? Maybe another monument? A conference? Doesn’t this statue have “artistic merit”? Forward gets past the statues to the world they immobilize.
The opposite of stone colonialism is what the 19th century revolutionaries in England called “the mobility.” Counter to the world of statues, Fanon dreamed of running. Get Out wanted to escape the Sunken Place. It’s Fallism, but it’s more than falling, it’s movement. Forward movement.
Third International Eugenics Conference exhibit on Roosevelt
The NYC Monument Commission was a failure. It delivered a hot mess of recommendations for more: more bureaucracy, more signs and “>more monuments. This is called an “additive” policy. Without a commitment to anti-racism and decolonial practice, none of it makes sense. The missed opportunity is that a good faith anti-racist, decolonial project could show people of all backgrounds, including Italian-Americans, why the monuments must fall.
This is not trivial. While liberals want to make the racist president fall, they can’t even agree to take down statues of racist presidents. That’s why the monuments matter, as the white supremacists have long known. White racism remains “deniable,” even when said out loud, as the latest Trump scandal shows. It works as a particular structure of feeling, invisible to those on the “inside” (known as white) but all too real to those excluded. The monuments are palpable, immensely material nodes in the network of white supremacy.
What I’m arguing for is precisely an “art”–including museum practice, education at all levels, and activism–that takes decolonizing and anti-racism as its first principles.
In what follows, I examine
how the report comes to decide to do nothing in the case of the President Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
how the Memorial visibly incarnates concepts of racial hierarchy and was designed to be part of the Museum’s advocacy for eugenics
how that agenda is an active part of the anti-immigration movement today
how an anti-racist approach might offer a positive means to make the monuments fall.
TL; DR? Skip to the action section at the end!
Before beginning, I want to note that the Commission was often divided and many members would probably agree with much of what I’m going to write. Somehow, the status quo always prevails, even when there is an exact divide as in the case of Roosevelt. Mayor de Blasio opted for no change in all cases, except for the statue of Marion J. Sims–a decision that now has to be reviewed by the community board and then the Public Design Commission, so don’t expect to see a removal any time soon.
1. Complexity
Roosevelt Memorial. Photo by An Rong Xu
How did the decision to keep the Roosevelt Memorial, protested by the American Indian Movement as long ago as 1971, get taken? The key principle for the commission in relation to evaluating monuments is “complexity,” which receives an unlikely definition:
acknowledging layered and evolving narratives represented in New York City’s public spaces, with preference for additive, relational, and intersectional approaches over subtractive ones. Monuments and markers have multiple meanings that are difficult to unravel, and it is often impossible to agree on a single meaning.
This watered down version of the deconstructive principle of undecidability makes little sense. Complexity is the interpretation of how complexes work: a situation with multiple, intersecting elements but not a synonym for unintelligibility. Nor is it endlessly relative: in given situations, one vector is often determining. If monuments were really so unintelligible, it’s hard to imagine why so many of them have been built, let alone why people are so keen to defend them and why the Commission wants more to be built.
2. Making Race Visible
Here’s how this works in practice. While half the group clearly saw the Memorial as depicting racial hierarchy, “complexity” resulted because:
Some Commission members pointed to art-historical interpretations of the two standing figures as allegorical, representing the continents of the Americas and Africa, emphasized by the animals in relief on the parapet wall behind them. This analysis included evidence that the sculpture was meant to represent Roosevelt’s belief in the unity of the races. In this interpretation, the figures are in no way abject.
This statement is remarkably tendentious. Roosevelt’s 1905 speech on race made it clear that he believed in a limited equality of opportunity for both the “forward” (meaning white) and “backward” (meaning Black) “races.” But as the terms indicate, he did not for a minute think the “races” were equal. Historian Theodore Dyer noted in his 1980 book on Roosevelt and race that the president believed in “Anglo-Saxon racial superiority to American Indians and American blacks.”
Now, it is enough for someone to have an alternative point of view for there to be deadlock. Note that we are not discussing Fox News here but a sophisticated and widely-recognized group of art world luminaries and other professionals. But critiques of “race” or colonialism were not the priority of the majority who declared their
paramount values [to be] art, public space, and civic discourse
Paramount for whom? To what end?
Roosevelt from below
Let’s look at the Memorial itself. In the two splendid photos by An Rong Xu above, it’s clear that the animals on the wall–we are, after all, at the Museum of Natural History–have no visible connection to the Memorial. The strikingly disproportionate scale of the figures discredits any idea that these figures are equal or unified. That’s even before the racialized stereotyping of the Indigenous and African figures are considered. And note the absurdly over-muscular and newly hirsute body of the Emperor-President as well. The contrast is unmistakeable and intentional.
The Commission’s claim that sculptor James Earle Fraser meant for the figures to represent the continents of Africa and America is advanced only in a Metropolitan Museum catalog entry to another sculpture without reference or documentary support. It is unconvincing. While there are well-known precedents for the Four Continents, like Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s 1872 group sculpture, The Four Parts of the World Holding the Celestial Sphere, I know of no precedent for a two continent sculpture before 1939.
On the other hand, New York City knew well Daniel Chester French’s famed sculptures of the four Continents on the Custom House downtown (1903-07). His America was a group in which an allegorical female figure actively dominates Indigenous figures: by that analogy, Roosevelt would be America and the two figures his dominated subjects. And that surely is the right way to see the sculpture. The group depicts Roosevelt dominating an African and American Indian as representatives, not of continents, but of “races.”
Daniel Chester French “America” (1902)
This analysis suggests why the Commission is so reluctant to act: if Roosevelt must fall, what is the case for French? Perhaps it’s a better sculpture in formal terms. But does it make sense that this vision of America trampling Quetzlcoatl underfoot is outside the New York Museum of the American Indian? And if so to whom?
3. Eugenics and Immigration
Display of eugenic sterilization at AMNH (1932)
Why did the AMNH want a statue of Roosevelt at all? Because Roosevelt epitomized the eugenic, imperial racism the Museum wanted to promote. The Report suggests:
Approximately half of the Commission: believe that additional historical research is necessary before recommendations can be offered.
Direct information linking Roosevelt, the AMNH, the Memorial and eugenics is, in fact, widely available: here is a summary.
The AMNH was a bastion of eugenics under the long directorship (1908-33) of Henry Fairfield Osborn. In 1916, Osborn wrote the preface to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (later much admired by Hitler):
Race implies heredity, and heredity implies all the moral, social, and intellectual characteristics and traits which are the springs of politics and government. Conservation of that race, which has given us the true spirit of Americanism, is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country
Environmental conservation was not, then, the “good” side of the AMNH in contrast to its “bad” racism: they were part and parcel of the same race politics. Roosevelt supported eugenic principles, saying in 1914
I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done.
Osborn unsurprisingly campaigned for a Roosevelt Memorial at the AMNH as soon as the president died in 1919. He gained his greatest success in helping pass the Immigration Act of 1924 that severely limited immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. This Act inspires the current administration’s opposition to immigration, leading to Osborn’s race theory being quoted on the front page of the New York Times this weekend. In other words: this is not over.
In the context of rising fascism and support for race science and eugenics, the Third International Eugenics conference was held at the AMNH in 1932. Osborn’s keynote was a jeremiad against birth control and for what he called “birth selection.” He repeated that environmental conservation was a key part of “improving the race,” meaning white people. His address noted six “overs” in the then-present:
Over-destruction of natural resources….Over-population…with consequent permanent unemployment of the least fitted. I have reached the conclusion that overpopulation and underemployment may be regarded as twin sisters
In short, his proposed solution for the mass unemployment caused by the Depression was eugenic birth selection, including forced sterilization, as the exhibit made clear (see image above), noting that over 15,000 enforced eugenic sterilizations had been performed by 1932 in the United States, including a small number in New York State. Upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927 in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, there would ultimately be over 70,000 such sterilizations in the US.
Good examples of birth selection were on display at the Eugenics Conference as well, such as the all-white membership of Congress. Notably, there was a display of the eugenically desirable “pedigree” of Theodore Roosevelt.
Third International Eugenics Conference exhibit on Roosevelt
In case there is any doubt as to the connection of the Memorial under construction at the AMNH to this chart at the time of its display, a sculpted bust of Roosevelt is placed at the top left.
And the AMNH Trustees said as much when the Memorial was opened in 1936, just after Osborn had died:
For more than sixteen years the late Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn had given his time, energy and thought to produce a structure, which he felt would best memorialize Theodore Roosevelt. …The trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, who will later control the operation and maintenance of the memorial, have pledged themselves, …, to carry out the educational purposes laid down by their late President Osborn for their guidance.
Central to Osborn’s life work was the racist hierarchy of eugenics, the control of immigration, the deportation of unwelcome migrants, and the enforced control of human reproduction. It is impossible that the Trustees meant anything else.
4. Eugenics Now
Nor are these eugenics solely a thing of the past. This week it emerged that University College London has been holding a series of eugenics conferences, calling for the “phasing out” of “populations of incompetent cultures.” These events are funded by an unpleasant US-based outfit called The Pioneer Fund. This group was founded by Wycliffe Draper, a collaborator of Osborne’s. His nephew Fairfield Osborn was a founding director and continued to work with Draper until they split in the late 1950s.
Today, the Fund supports white supremacist Richard Spencer, who was active at Charlottesville, and it continues to promote old-fashioned Jew hatred.
But it’s not just the lunatic fringe. The continuance of eugenic ideas occurs every time someone calls someone else a “moron” or an “imbecile,” which were categories of eugenic deficiency. Or when Donald Trump says “laziness is a trait in blacks.”
Trump is adept at the art of racialized provocation. The day after his “shithole” remarks, he appeared to the press in front of a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt.
Trump and Roosevelt
There is no danger that Roosevelt will be forgotten or erased from history if his statue is removed. The point is rather that his statue is part of an active network of racialized signification. Which is to say: how does race have meaning? It connects. It links Trump to Roosevelt via the idea of the dominant Hero, whiteness, and white supremacy.
5. Why Everyone Should Want the Monuments to Fall
In the Commission Report on the Columbus Monument, the 1891 lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans is cited to explain why the Monument was needed. Indeed, this period saw the notorious “one drop” rule in Louisiana, meaning that a person with any non-“white” descent at all was considered “colored,” to use the terminology of the time. In 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a segregated railway train in New Orleans, leading to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld “separate but equal.”
It was in this intensely racialized context that the Columbus Monument was erected in New York. The claim Italian-Americans were making was to be “white.” And it’s not hard to understand why, given the then-ongoing violence of white supremacy. But that is no reason to sustain the argument today. Without even considering Columbus’ devastating impact for Indigenous peoples–though of course in a wider frame we should– present-day Italian-Americans and other “whites” should not want to be white in the manner of 1892. And that’s what this Monument means. But it didn’t work.
The 1924 Immigration Act set the annual quota of any nationality at 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States in 1890. According to eugenic theory, there is not a single “white” European “race” but rather three. The eugenically preferred “Nordic” race is truly “white.” Distinct were Southern Europeans–mostly Italians for practical purposes–and Eastern Europeans, meaning Jews. The 1924 Act intended to promote Nordic immigration and limit that of Southern and Eastern Europeans.
The results of the Act were dramatic. From 1901-1914, 2.9 million Italians immigrated, an average of 210,000 per year. Under the 1924 Act, only 4,000 per year were admitted–a 98% decrease. These restrictions did not end until 1965 and Attorney General Sessions has cited the 1924 Act as an inspiration for current attempts to limit immigration.
In short, while Italians in 1892 certainly had a case that they had been violently subjected to white supremacy, their perhaps understandable attempt to join its ranks by means of the Columbus Monument did not succeed. Today, no one questions the “whiteness” of Italians and all Europeans are considered “white.” But this is not a club that anyone should want to belong to.
Just as several Italian-Americans advocated at the NYC Commission hearings, anti-racist Italians should support removal of the Columbus Monument. An anti-racist campaign would connect Italian-Americans to a different history, the long arc of justice. But prominent New York leaders like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio have made it clear they want no part of this anti-racist rethinking of whiteness. The majority of the Commission followed this lead.
6. Action
All the monuments are connected. The Columbus Monument made the claim that Italians were white in the moment of legalized segregation. Roosevelt’s support for eugenics was why Osborn and the American Museum of Natural History wanted a memorial. The same people supported the 1924 Immigration Act that cut Italian immigration by 98%. In short, the “whiteness” these monuments embody excludes almost everyone and perpetuates systemic and hierarchical racism.
The monuments must fall not because people were bad then and we are good today but because the racism they embody is still active and growing.
Building more monuments or putting up signs is not a substitute for the long and difficult work of anti-racism. Anyone can say “I am not a racist.” The question is “what are you doing to end racism?
The Commission thinks that action should be taken in regard to monuments if there is: “Sustained adverse public reaction (two years of more); and/or Instantaneous large-scale community opposition.” So let’s give it to them.
Today hearings were held in Manhattan for the Mayor’s Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers. It was a real New York occasion, with dashes of radical politics, establishment equivocation, blunt force and moments of pure eccentricity. Anyone who wanted could speak for three minutes in randomly assigned slots. Despite being called for the day before the holiday at 10am, about 100 people attended with a good sprinkling of local media.
The Commission hearing 11.22.17
As luck would have it Decolonize This Place organizer Conor Tomàs Reed went first and called on the commission to remove the Columbus monument at Columbus Circle, the Theodore Roosevelt statue at the American Museum of Natural History and the Marion J. Sims memorial at 103rd St. As Reed said
These three monuments serve as a daily reminder of colonialism, indigenous genocide, and white supremacist eugenics. That they are familiar landmarks in this city shows just how much we have inured ourselves to the horrors that they celebrate.
Decolonize This Place
This bracing challenge was soon countered by a succession of “proud Italian Americans” declaring undying love for Columbus and that any attempt to remove the monument was an outrage. One speaker from the Knights of Columbus claimed opponents were like the KKK because the Klan were (he claimed) against Columbus in the 1930s. These statements were undercut by a young Italian-American activist from SURJ who pointed out that Columbus lived about 350 years before Italy was a nation; spoke only Catalan; and served the Spanish monarchy. But no politician could have missed the vehemence and belligerence of the opposition to any change whatever, even adding a sign.
If most of the discussion was about Columbus, in nearly four hours of testimony, very few Indigenous voices were heard. One exception was Robert Borrero of the International Indian Treaty Council, who spoke with dignified restraint about Columbus’s brutality to his own Taino people.
Several African Americans testified to the scandal of Marion J. Sims, who did medical experiments on African American women without anesthetic, having a memorial. One flamboyant Jewish lady got the only laugh of the day when she concluded emotional testimony saying
Keep all the monument–except that Sims, I never heard about that, he’s awful
So if I had to bet, I’d guess Sims will be the token withdrawal. The co-commissioner Tom Finkelpearl, NYC’s cultural director, opened with a slightly lame PowerPoint suggesting alternatives to removal, like adding signs; commissioning art projects; or augmented reality apps. This seemed to be a clear signal of the Commission’s thinking, although radical academics like Audra Simpson and Jack Tchen are members and might be able to push for a little more. Perhaps the markers to Marshall Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, who directed the genocidal Vichy regime in Second World War France, might be quietly uprooted.
There are two more opportunities to intervene:
Monday, Nov. 27 at 10 a.m. — Bronx Borough Hall, Rotunda, 851 Grand Concourse, the Bronx
Tuesday, Nov. 28 at 10 a.m. — Staten Island Borough Hall, Room 125, 10 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island
Even so nothing will happen fast this being New York. The report will come out in December. The Mayor will then decide which of their recommendations to adopt. And then it all goes back to the beginning with the community boards and a multi-step process back to the usual parks and culture review board. So here we are, giving reform a chance. Expect to hear about a return to revolutionary tactics soon!
Roosevelt Must Fall
As for me, I spoke about the Theodore Roosevelt Equestrian Monument at the American Museum of Natural History. For the record, this is what I said:
Roosevelt Equestrian Memorial
“I would like to suggest to you that the Equestrian Monument that is part of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial at the American Museum of Natural History should be removed because it visualizes systems of racialized hierarchy, which, while discredited, continue to do harm in the present. Additional signs or information cannot replace the visceral impact of visual materials, as advertisers and artists alike know very well. Certainly, that removal would need to be the start of an extensive repurposing of the Museum, which is long overdue. But given that the Natural History Museum is the most visited in New York, with over 6.5 million visitors, it cannot be right to leave a symbol of racial hierarchy in place.
Roosevelt died in 1919 and the New York memorial was at once proposed by Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History. That same year, the Museum Journal claimed to demonstrate a “relationship between [skin] color and achievement.” Osborn was a believer in Nordic supremacy, a theory which also entailed the decline of white dominance unless immigration was controlled. These theories unfortunately continue to have purchase today. In 1921, the AMNH hosted the International Congress of Eugenics under Osborn’s organization. It opened a Hall of Public Health to promote eugenics (the attempt to breed out “impurities” from humans, also involving forced sterilization) and the effort to control immigration that resulted in the 1924 Immigration Act.
Compare the “slope” on the three heads
The Equestrian monument was sculpted by James Earle Fraser, who had earlier made a piece called The End of the Trail, illustrating the eugenicist belief in the period that Indians would “die out.” The monument visualizes belief in racial superiority through the now discredited so-called science of craniometry—measuring skulls. The idea was that the perfect skull had a vertical forehead, which is hard to find in an actual human being, so the example given was usually a Greek statue. In the US this idea was widely disseminated in Josiah Nott’s 1857 Indigenous Races of the Earth. This work claimed that there are several distinct human races, visible in their different skull shapes more than superficial details like skin color. In this framework, a statue is not a depiction of a racist idea, it is a racist idea.
If you examine the Equestrian Monument, you can see that Roosevelt’s skull is close to vertical, while the African figure has a noticeably sloped forehead and the Indian has the most sloped of all. In short, the Monument visibly incarnates Osborne’s system of racial hierarchy, as the Trustees acknowledged at the dedication ceremony in 1936 (the sculpture was completed in 1939). Of course, Roosevelt’s towering position over the half-dressed African and Indian reinforces that meaning, derived as it was from Roman Imperial sculpture.
It’s true that most people have now forgotten the specifics of craniometry. But the racist term “slopehead” indicates that the false claim of cranial angle still influences present-day racist caricature, usually applied to people of Asian descent—it’s in the cult film Pulp Fiction for example, a Harvey Weinstein production, I might add.
So it’s not a question that people at that time had bad ideas and we censor the monument for that but that it actively visualizes and perpetuaties racial stereotypes today.
I’m second from the right, speaking. Photo: MTL+
Sources
Anon, “The New York Theodore Roosevelt Memorial.” Science 83, no. 2143 (1936): 75-76.
David Bindman, Ape to Apollo : aesthetics and the idea of race in the 18th century (London: Reaktion, 2002)
“All hitherto existing visuality becomes aesthetic by being misogynist.”
This is the necessary update to my earlier claim that “the right to look ….is very much a feminist project.” Visuality is “masculine” or heroic because it is misogynist. It is that misogyny that enables its claim to legitimacy, that is, to make and embody law. The permanent and constituent crisis that visuality visualizes is that which claims to require patriarchy as its solution, a rear-view mirror engagement with the present. Case in point: Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the classic Blade Runner (1982), on which every visual culture scholar has opined.
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Before beginning this rewrite, let’s take a moment to say that I’m aware that this is not just any modulation of an analysis. It’s an admission of past failing that has been made glaring by present conditions. It’s up to you, the reader, to decide what to make of that. This is me beginning to try to do better by working it through.
In The Right to Look, the patriarchal authority to visualize is set against collective, democratic forms of countervisuality, yes. But I’m a little bit surprised looking back at it now to see that the feminist/gender/sexuality analysis is not well worked out. Why? I’m male identified, so that probably doesn’t help. There was a foregrounding of a masculine seriousness about war in the period I was writing (2003-10). I think, too, that I wrongly assumed the gender dimension of the ridiculous hyper-masculinity of the Heroic tradition to be both well established in visual culture analysis and so obviously reactionary that it did not need as much focus. And I was wildly wrong. Let’s start again.
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misogynist visuality
“Visuality” is the specific technology of coloniality formed on the plantation by the overseer, generalized as a technology of colonial war, and later named in English by Thomas Carlyle (1840). All such misogynist visuality is the property of the Great Man or the Hero. To understand what this means, it is only necessary to know that present-day alt-right considers Trump to be such a Hero.
Colonial visuality operates in complexes, which classify (free from slave, for example) and then separates the classified orders. That order holds because it produces an aesthetic, that which Fanon called the “aesthetic of respect for the established [patriarchal] order.” This aesthetic is always nostalgic, always bound to what Carlyle called “Tradition,” always haunted by the fear of its imminent disappearance. Which is to say, it is always violent.
In the era of neo-colonial war in Iraq and Afghanistan, enabled by the drone, there was a return to overt ideology of “commander’s visualization,” to quote the US Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual. It also seemed as if that visualizing was not hegemonic. The “aesthetic” of permanent war (in movies like The Hurt Locker) felt unfinished and thereby contestable because there was no way to make it feel necessary and right.
That analysis underestimated the necessity of unfinish to the neo-imperial masculine aesthetic, the need it has to feel threatened and on the verge of being overwhelmed, to sustain and reproduce itself. “Chaos” is visuality’s always feminized other in Carlyle and in all subsequent claims to Heroism. The opposition to Heroism was, according to Carlyle, “the female Insurrectionary force,” always already racialized as “black.” Carlyle did not even bother to consider the possibility of a female Hero, which would (in his view) produce monstrous forms like Amazons and Maenads. “Female force” is Heroism’s internal challenge to be overcome, as a constitutive, embodied part of itself. This ideology is phantasmatic, even ridiculous, to be sure, but it has had very real effects.
Indeed, coloniality has now created a new form of heroic masculinity for the aftermath of the conquest of (M)other nature. Surviving in the midst of climate disaster is the new heroism visualized in Blade Runner 2049, in ways that bear little resemblance to lived experience. Today’s self-proclaimed Heroes embrace the earth system crisis as their chance to wage permanent misogynist war. Real men eat GMO, use pesticide, burn coal and master the resultant chaos because mastering (female) chaos is what (male) Heroes do. What follows is the spectacle of Trump minions advocating for coal at the climate conference, while only 8% of college-educated Republicans “believe” in climate change, as if it is a branch of theology. In this view, faith rests in the Hero, who welcomes climate chaos as a test of his strength.
2049 is now
Blade Runner 2049
Misogynist coloniality has created a nostalgic aesthetic, such as that deployed in the self-consciously “epic,” which is to say, “heroic” film Blade Runner 2049. It failed at the box office but so did Trump. For my generation of visual culture studies, the first Blade Runner was canonical, taught over and again. So its return was nostalgic for me too. Like Bertolt Brecht siding with the cowboys during Westerns–as he admitted he did–I can’t deny enjoying watching it, both for its intense cinematic experience of sound and image and for the postmodern Proustian resonance of rediscovering past media time.
But this film not only visualizes the white supremacist masculinity that is making the world toxic, it takes active pleasure in the toxicity of the world. It is now the visible analogy of the hidden-in-plain-sight violent, abusive, misogynist Hollywood system evoked by the name “Weinstein.” Everywhere you look in this extended exploration of white masculinity there are available, conventionally attractive, young, white female bodies, floating on the side of buildings; or activated as software when the Man returns home to his miserable apartment; or standing on the street waiting for sex work. In this future, a (male) wish fulfillment if there ever was one, no one is trans or queer, and hardly anyone isn’t white.
In Blade Runner 2049, the new white male hero, known only as K, is literally a machine. K (Ryan Gosling) embodies the Heroic interface of the corporation and the police, which Gramsci called Caesarism. K marches through the orange desert in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas in search of the lost original Blade Runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford). It’s radioactive but he doesn’t care because he’s a machine. If such orange effects usually result from desert winds, recently seen in the U.K., the hyper-smog today enveloping Delhi and Lahore is a suffocating grey that locals are actively comparing to Blade Runner. Without the “conquest of nature” anaesthetic to make it palatable. Unlike Blade Runner, helicopters can’t even fly in the dense, gritty air mass.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog
K’s wandering through radioactive Vegas is a digital upgrade of the industrial-era Romantic fantasy of the conquest of nature. In Caspar David Friedrich’s much-reproduced painting, the wanderer, known only through his bourgeois suit, is colonial master of all he surveys, like Keats’ Cortés, “silent on a peak in Darien.” What lies beneath him is said to be fog but most such precipitation in the period was coal-induced smog. It’s not so far from the Wanderer to K, except that the “human” (which is to say “white” masculine) gaze is now automated.
the machine gaze
Opening shot Bladerunner 2049
How does the machine visualize? The first shot of BR 2049 fills the screen for a second: an all-seeing blue eye, with blond eyelashes. It is that of a replicant, an artificial person. Nowhere else in BR 2049 does this combination of blue-eyed blonde appear, so it is not the eye of a character. It is the ideal of machine vision, the machine as Hero. In the next instant, blink and you miss it, we zoom into the eye, into swirls of blue, and emerge in a giant solar panel array, converting the tomb-like sky into power.
The Solar Eye
All puns are intended by director Denis Villeneuve: the replicant’s eye is replaced by the solar “eye,” where neither is an “I.” Power is all, electric and social. If “we,” the spectators, are, as it were, in the eye of the machine, in their mind, then where are we? And who are “we,” when people are not always human?
The primary work of visualizing is classification, creating here an imagined distinction between the “human” and the machine, or replicant. Any such classification is a reenactment of the colonial hierarchy of the human, in which most people do not achieve the fully human status that is reserved for “whiteness.”
In Blade Runner 2049, all the major characters are machines. The only human that plays a role is the police officer Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), desperate to keep “order,” meaning the separation between human and machine. It’s already too late. She’s killed by a replicant. The fully human “humans” are elsewhere in the place the film calls “off-world,” the new interstellar colony.
Luv’s Eye
The replicant Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), who kills Joshi, achieves perfect machine visualization, sublimely reflected in her sunglasses that act as her remote screen vision. A machine-Medusa, Luv directs a lethal missile attack to protect K in his hunt for the natural-born replicant, a mechanical messiah. In the animation of her cyber-eye, Luv embodies all the current dreams of power, like that of the wide-angle drone apparatus named The Gorgon Stare. What Luv cannot do, the film suggests, is love. She is all war, the female counter-insurrectionary force machine, the necessary counterpart to the heroic drive of corporate leader Wallace (Jared Leto).
wish fulfillment
The sardonic displacement of “love” into Luv acknowledges the misogynist violence at the center of the story. Blade Runner 2049 centers around the pursuit of a child born to the replicants Rachael (Sean Young) and Deckard (Harrison Ford). In the first Blade Runner film (1982), Deckard falls for Rachael. When he tries to kiss her, she pulls away. He slams the door, pushes back into the blinds and makes her say “I want you.” Then she acts out the kiss. Did she love him? Or Luv him, as directed by her software? Deckard doesn’t care.
The YouTube post of Deckard’s assault on Rachael (labeled a “love scene’)
Deckard, we learn in BR 2049, was programmed to desire Rachael (meaning that he is himself a replicant, as everyone except Harrison Ford has worked out long ago). So the first film literally engenders the second with the birth of their child, which conveniently causes Rachael’s death. In BR 2049 we discover Deckard living out a bro-noir life of mourning and drinking in ruined Las Vegas hotels. Captured, he again causes the death of a newly re-replicated Rachael. Like Wallace’s casual murder of a newly-created replicant, this misogynist killing has no other function than to continue the wish fulfillment that violence is power.
For Deckard’s assault plays out the elemental pornographic fantasy that whatever a man wants, a woman does too. In the recent HBO series The Deuce, the sex worker turned porn film director Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaall) keeps reminding everyone that porn is “fantasy.” It’s as if she’s speaking out of character here in this sadly misogynist and racist series–beautifully staged and shot, just like BR 2049–as the present-day actor addressing the audience.
In the minds of assaulting men, anything can be a justification. Women’s words play no significant role in this justifying narrative. Yale students chanted “no means yes, yes means anal” in 2010, so this is (by the hierarchy’s own standards) a rot that spreads from the head. Maybe now Sean Young’s claims to have been abused by a studio head and Warren Beatty might be finally believed.
fetishism
In BR 2049, K doesn’t bother with complicated replicant Luv. He has an A.I. called Joi (Ana de Armas) instead, a software construct designed to meet his every need. Joi makes home dinners for him and then changes into vampy outfits, the digitized remake of the 1950s every MAGA man needs. The fetish she offers K is the siren call of whiteness: “You’re special.”
Joi “believes” this–or, more exactly, has been programmed to say it–so that K continues to do his work. In just the same way, the “wages of whiteness” like racist statues, the national anthem, and not being shot by police compensate for the not so perfect lived experience of actually being “white.”
Only K finds out that, despite his fantasy, he isn’t special, he’s not a naturally-born replicant, but just another shop-bought off-the-shelf model. Rather than give up his fetishism, he transposes it into the “noble death.” The rebel replicant leader suggests to him that such a death is the most human thing he can do, like Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities–whose 1935 movie ending was oddly watched in The Deuce as a form of sex work. K dies happily at the end, the first time he has smiled during the entire film.
But why would a machine that can see what humans have done to the world want to be human? There’s no reason that makes “sense” within the narrative, it’s just the old colonial fantasy that what “they” want above all is to be like “us.” And it’s the job of the Hero to stop them. Within the film narrative that doesn’t quite make sense but the real Hero is, in the cinematic fantasy, the male spectator, now aspiring to be a machine, a metaphor that also saturates sports fantasy.
condensation
K does achieve one notable visual first. Freud imagined Western male (hetero)sexuality to revolve around the (m)other/”whore” classification. These roles must then be separated to feel right and, goodness knows, a whole lot of “aesthetics” has followed from that separation. In a world where, according to the New Yorker of all places, incest is the top-rated theme in porn, such distinction seems more than a little quaint.
In BR 2049, K manages to have it both ways by inserting his eroticized (m)other Joi into the body of a replicant sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis). The resulting not quite perfectly overlapping three-way was a tour-de-force of animation and white male peculiarity. What does the white (machine) man want? To fuck (with) his own software. Apparently.
white supremacy
What does machine visuality want? To sustain the separation between the human and the enslaved. In the first Blade Runner, the replicants are to be pitied as they are hunted down. Now the replicant capitalist Wallace demands the production of an enslaved machine labor force, creating a new hierarchy between the human machine and the enslaved machine.
The enslaved machine will be known to be enslaved in the same way that the United States knew its enslaved to be so: because they were their mother’s child. An enslaved person could be of many phenotypes and genealogies. But there was no gainsaying partus sequitur ventrem, literally “the offspring follows the womb.” Control of the womb is, as United States politics amply demonstrates, central to all coloniality. As Saidiya Hartman puts it, “the master dreams of future increase.” Androids may dream of electric sheep but the ones in charge dream of primitive accumulation.
In the imaginary of Blade Runner 2049, the ever-more perfect replicant can defeat the test as to whether it feels. But it cannot refute being its mother’s child, although that “kinship loses meaning,” as Hortense Spillers argues in the context of slavery, when “one is neither female or male.” Enslaved or machine, the meaningless of the non-human condition continues. The patriarchy wins on both sides of the film: the replicant natural-born child lives (win for Wallace’s slave patriarchy). Deckard lives, and like a latter day father of the Horatii, gets to claim the same woman as “his” child, free of both her mother and K, her potential love interest (win for replicant patriarchy).
the end of patriarchy. or the end of the world?
It turns out that it is not the end of capitalism that is impossible to imagine over that of the end of the world. It is that of patriarchy. Worse, for patriarchy to continue, it now imagines that its conquest of nature must continue, whether in the machine body, the transformed planet, or the racialized hierarchies of the human and the enslaved.
