Global Raciality

Empire, PostColoniality, DeColoniality

Paola Bacchetta, Sunaina Maira, Howard Winant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138391642
• eBook ISBN: 9780429688263
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Global Raciality expands our understanding of race, space, and place by exploring forms of racism and anti-racist resistance worldwide. Contributors address neoliberalism; settler colonialism; race, class, and gender intersectionality; immigrant rights; Islamophobia; and homonationalism; and investigate the dynamic forces propelling anti-racist solidarity and resistance cultures. Midway through the Trump years and with a rise in nativism fervor across the globe, this expanded approach captures the creativity and variety found in the fight against racism we see the world over.

Chapters focus on both the immersive global trajectories of race and racism, and the international variation in contemporary configurations of racialized experience. Race, class, and gender identities may not only be distinctive, they can extend across borders, continents, and oceans with remarkable demonstrations of solidarity happening all over the world. Palestinians, Black Panthers, Dalit, Native Americans, and Indian feminists among others meet and interact in this context. Intersections between race and such forms of power as colonialism and empire, capitalism, gender, sexuality, religion, and class are examined and compared across different national and global contexts. It is in this robust and comparative analytical approach that Global Raciality reframes conventional studies on postcolonial regimes and racial identities and expression.

PART I

Empire

CHAPTER 1

Imagining New Worlds

Anti-Indianism and the Roots of United States Exceptionalism

LEECE M. LEE-OLIVER

To the Senate and House of Representatives:

In transmitting to you this my fourth annual message it is with thankfulness to the Giver of All Good that as a nation we have been blessed for the past year with peace at home, peace abroad, and a general prosperity vouchsafed to but few peoples.

Ulysses S. Grant, State of the Union Address, December 2, 1872

The world is the safest when we are the strongest militarily.

Marco Rubio, post-campaign speech, February 21, 2016

The opening lines of President Ulysses S. Grant’s address in 1872, and those of defeated presidential candidate Marco Rubio in 2016, signal the ruminations on human difference that have embedded the discourses of Western exceptionalism from the early inception of the United States to today. Richly implicit, their remarks interlock Western hegemony, domestically and globally, with the principles of meritocracy, the divine right to territory, political authority and, above all, the safe pursuit of prosperity for some. Grant’s brief statement offers a glimpse into his larger body of speeches that read like treatises wrapping projects of empire building in narratives of peace and exceptionalism. Rubio’s point evokes the legacy of Western exceptionalism that centralizes the US as the necessary pulse of a world dependent on its militarization, likewise for peace. In addition to the supposition that violence begets peace, the unspoken racialization of the supra-national “few” that Grant implicitly conceives as the nation, noted in the “we” of Rubio’s point, evokes exceptional Americans for whom divine providence has granted a future and a purpose—to acquire peace and prosperity through domestic and world domination. The abject subjugation of the Other is systematically erased in the rhetoric of exceptionalism. The state’s interpretation of the “corporeal” as a logical basis for a differential valuation of peoples, as Michal Omi and Howard Winant illustrate (2015), has “served for half a millennium as a practical tool in the organization of human hierarchy” (Omi and Winant, 2015: 22). This chapter explores two relational points of departure. First, it traces how Native Americans, racialized as “Indians,” are interpolated in projects of Western expansion. Second, it examines how the illocutionary act of political rhetoric uses “anti-Indianism” to put in motion and produce the metaphysical and material outcomes of white American exceptionalism in the United States and globally.¹

Overstating Exceptionalism, Concealing Genocide: “Indian” Eradication, 1860–1890

A review of the tailings of North America’s “Indian wars” helps to uncover some of the violence that Grant’s presidential speeches conceal. Prior to becoming president, Grant served as a general in the US Army from 1864 to 1869, which was a time of increasing, widespread, and indiscriminate military and societal violence against “Indians.” During this time, the Northern Plains had become an area of heightened interest to western expansionists, industrialists, and political hopefuls. Western forces intending to guard the thoroughfare of the transatlantic railway and see through the project of state formation, or gain access to gold in the Black Hills, occupied the territories, set up forts, and administered the relationship between the US and “Indians.” Many of the Native American peoples were protected by treaty, including the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851). Yet, abject isolation was imposed and the use of massacres to get rid of the last vestiges of unincorporated “Indian Country,” a term still used by the US government to denote the sovereign lands of Native Americans and enemy territories overseas, was common (Holm, 1995; Silliman, 2008). Too many to note, notorious place names like Marias, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee signify some of the state-sponsored genocidal efforts to deracinate the peoples by segregation, genocide, and white settlement in the Northern Plains. The justifications drew on religiosity and the fantastical notion that the New World was a boundless Eden made for the pursuit of Christian stabilization and Western modernity. Race, because of its usefulness as an indicator of cultural (read as religious and social) and biological determination, became ingrained as a key tool of differentiation between white “American” entitlement and “Indian” rightlessness (Wilson, 1998; Greene and Scott, 2004; Ostler, 2004; Williams, 2005; Lee, 2013; Omi and Winant, 2015).

For the West, including Grant, the so-called last of the Indian wars were on. The normalization and acceptability of “Indian” deaths, at that time, was largely aided by legal caveats and political conjecture that represented “Indians” as incommensurable Others. It also helped to popularize the belief that committing violence against “Indians” was a positive expression of national loyalty and Christian duty (Bancroft, 1883; Deloria, 2004; Flint, 2009; Lee, 2013). In his examination of Sioux resistance in the 1800s, historian Jeff Ostler explains that officials and settlers not only found “Indians,” their cultures, and political sovereignty intolerable but:

The theorists of the American nation . . . believed that the United States embodied principles that demanded universal adherence. A society organized on the basis of widespread individual ownership of property did not simply suit the temperament of particular people; it was the highest form of civilization, one that represented humanity’s advance beyond primitive forms of social organization.

(Ostler, 2004: 15)

Men and women, elite and settler, missionary and nun, stewarded many of the settlement strongholds, such as forts, and institutions like the American Indian Boarding School system that worked on assimilating the surviving “Indian” children into heteronormative, Christian life (Lomawaima and Child, 2000). As inherently Christian, the idea of the “white man’s burden” held fast to the belief that the wilderness, whether found in the outdoors or within the body of “the Indian,” required Christian tutelage and violence to achieve its eradication (Lee, 2013). The use of violence to curtail the spread of “Indianness” in the broader context of the West was so normalized that for a time Native Americans could be killed with impunity (Ross, 2004). The following examples illustrate this point and draw attention to Grant’s eschewal of the state violence that engulfed the period.

In 1862 more than 300 Sioux men were accused and declared guilty, through court-martial, of raping and murdering white settlers. No defense attorney was permitted. No real investigation was deemed necessary. President Lincoln was in office and called for the mass execution of the thirty-eight remaining Sioux men, who were hung in a public forum. It was the largest mass execution of domestic subjects committed by the US government in US history. Continuing on this path of expulsion, campaigns of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence erupted in Native American communities with regularity (Wilson, 1998; Deloria, 2004; Ostler, 2004).

By 1864, in Colorado territory, the rumblings of what would result in the Sand Creek massacre were underway months before the actual violence ensued. President Lincoln, who met with Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders, acknowledged them for encouraging their peoples to engage peacefully with the settler government. Lincoln granted the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples the protection of the US government and its military on the condition that they disarm. The leaders were given medals and a US flag and told that the flag would act as a directive to the US military to bypass the area during any military campaigns. However, territorial governor John Evans ordered the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples to relocate and banned them from receiving the promised governmental subsistence and protections they had garnered. Finding himself on the cusp of Colorado state formation, the governor had tired of what he saw as the federal government’s passive engagement with “Indians.” Claiming that every “Indian” was hostile, the governor “urged all out ‘extermination against the red devils,’ making no distinction between those Indians who were friendly and those who were not.” He justified the campaign with the logic that “the evidence was now ‘conclusive’ . . . that ‘most’ Indians on the plains were indeed ‘hostile’; it was, therefore, the citizens’ and the military’s right and obligation—for which they would be duly paid—to ‘pursue, kill, and destroy’ them all” (Stannard, 1992: 130). The term “hostile” legally determined “Indians” to be enemies of the state and condemned Native Americans of the Plains to death (Greene and Scott, 2004; Ross, 2004; Williams, 2005; Lee, 2013). The status allowed for grievous transgressions.

In concert with the governor’s rhetoric, news stories circulated in the region about “Indians” stealing from white settlers and, during one such attempt, allegations emerged that “Indians” had killed three white settlers. Those allegedly responsible were identified as Arapaho. Amid the chaos, several US Army troops visited the Sand Creek encampment to encourage Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples to leave the encampment and hunt for subsistence. The move led the majority of healthy men and boys to leave the encampment, leaving behind hundreds of unarmed peoples, primarily women, children, and elderly. Following their departure, on November 28, 1864, nearly 700 Army troops, including enlistees and volunteers, charged into the encampment and killed, “hunted,” and mutilated Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples over the course of a four-day onslaught. Two-thirds of those killed were female (Statement of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War, 1865 as reprinted in Carroll, 1973; Lee, 2013).

Among its many atrocities, the Sand Creek massacre exposes some of the deeper truths about gender, racist misogyny, and twisted ideas about “Indian” womanhood and masculinity that were common throughout the long period of western expansion in the United States. The troops spent four days in the so-called theatre of war slaughtering women, children, and elderly. As detailed in over sixty books on the massacre, the soldiers went to the bodies of the slain peoples and performed postmortem mutilations, removing unborn children from pregnant women’s bodies, severing breasts, scrotums, and labia—bodies and body parts that are not unwittingly associated with reproduction of the so-called race. Some soldiers wore the severed flesh on their hats and saddles and rode through local settlements in a “post-war” parade. The sight of troops wearing flesh as war trophies was not received well by all settlers or local missionaries. A congressional hearing was called and in 1885 the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War declared the massacre a war crime, noting that the people were “incapable of offering any resistance” (Carroll, 1973). The peoples, the committee also recognized, had been led to believe that they were protected by the same military that had descended on them (Carroll, 1973). Equally, or possibly more, problematic for the committee was the defacing of the Army uniform. Though at the beginning of their written opinion the committee laments the violence committed, the statement turns toward lambasting the troops for tarnishing the image of the government. No one suffered any legal consequence, no demotions in status were issued, but the committee revisited the refrain that the soldiers brought shame on an otherwise benevolent symbol of civilized society—the Army uniform (Carroll, 1973; Greene and Scott, 2004; Lee, 2013).

By reiterating the disgraced uniform, and upholding it as a representation of the government’s benevolence, the focus shifted to a new victim, the government. The humanity of the Cheyenne and Arapaho women, children and elders, their genders and ages, all phenomenological cues typically associated with innocence when victims are white, were erased, subverted by the appropriation of victimhood. After the hearing came to a close, Colonel John Chivington, a former minister and the primary military leader of the troops at Sand Creek, adopted the same tool, the device of moral righteousness, to cleanse his sullied reputation. In an open letter to the people of Colorado, Chivington proclaimed:

Lo, the poor Indian, in thy untutored greatness, you . . . have long been a bone of contention and many a villainous swindle has been perpetrated upon the Government in thy name and humanity, which would put to blush the unparalleled commander of the sons of sin, His Satanic Majesty, the Devil. . . . A white man demands the protection of our troops. . . . our enterprising freighters, emigrants and settlers, with their wives and children, have been murdered, scalped and their bodies horribly mutilated by these much abused sons of the plains.

(Chivington, June 1865: 1–2)

The supposition that the same type of violence and mutilation was engaged in by “Indians” is as close as Chivington, or anyone in the government, came to acknowledging the facts of the violence exhibited by troops during the Sand Creek massacre. Despite the nod, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: New Racial Studies and Global Raciality
• Introduction: Global Raciality: Empire, PostColoniality, DeColoniality
• Part I Empire
• Part II Postcoloniality
• Part III Decoloniality
• Afterword: Race and Empire Today
• List of Contributors
• Index