Tag: racism

Zombie America

America is under racist assault. It has been this way for centuries—as though a cult of the undead, the empty dispossessed can only see the world in one way—Us vs Them. Purposeful demolition is the foremost objective of the undead—led by the First Family of Destruction. The zombie ideologues now get their news from the Family, its enablers, sycophants and its media amplifiers. There’s no more capacity for the undead to change than there is for a jellyfish to float against the currents. Yes, the undead are the jellyfish of the logo-sphere and they carrying a nasty sting. 

There’s no aspiration, no value, no commitment or connection to the collective, only to a their narrow view of entitlement.  There’s been no event, no sacred passage, no period of trial or transition, no foundation for their actions other than domination, jealousy, greed, anger and vengeance. There’s been no transition, no developmental progress, no entrée into a wiser way of seeing based in reality instead of wish-fulfillment.

Traditional initiation crosses a threshold to join the continuous stream of birthing and dying, with all the triumph and adversity, love and suffering in between. Emerging successfully from an initiation would mean walking with our feet on the ground and our heads in the clouds (not the reverse), holding a natural connection with our selves, others and with the land. 

Traditional cultures whose initiations were integral to the continuity of their communities prescribed these rites on the cusp of adulthood. They require a separation, a death, an awakening to essence (or soul), a time of rebirth and a return. An initiation is a second birth, having grown up dependent on family and community, the initiate is prepared to establish a separate life, to be guided by a core vision and to live out a full investment in the community according to that vision. 

Initiation is also a rooting experience, a gesture of coming home in the body-mind of the initiate. The body of the initiate is infused with the land and the spirits of the land. They become One.  This is the indigenous experience of initiation. Imagining a shred of anything similar in the American racist zombie cult is a laughable fantasy. We are diminished by all of it—for 400 years. We, as a nation, have been the undead, lost. Sadly, on the issue of race, we are as homeless as the ones sleeping in doorways.

I am of a people who, historically, had no land. The cultural lore is of temporary residence and history has tragically proven the validity of that outlook. We were not nomads, unless you count wandering in the desert for 40 years after escaping slavery in Egypt. That was the original initiation of the Jewish people. As the story goes, we received not only land after the struggle, but a rebirth in that land blessed by the God of that land. True or not, the history of the Jewish people has been one of being landless—until the establishment of the State of Israel. Overlooking the injustice of that creation for the moment (and all the suffering it has unleashed), that land remains the State of Israel in the hearts of many Jews whether they live there or not. 

Even so, tracing my own roots in the Jewish diaspora over the last 150 years, I can say I’m a citizen of America. I could even say I own land or I might trace my life in America for four generations, but I do not have a place in the same sense in which I describe it above. Rural Americans do; urban/suburban Americans don’t. As Stephen Jenkinson has said, we have learned to make do with portable gods. I personally have by conventional definition been a nomad. The deeper yearning to be of a place remains. 

My advantage, my privilege, is that I was not ripped from my ancestral home and transported against my will to this land. And beyond the mass kidnapping and enslavement, the American tradition of making others landless in the course of claiming this land continues to this day. This ideology is, under Trump particularly, delivered every day by the occupying force of police and ICE whose job it has become to enforce the message: you do not belong here. You have no claim to this place. It is ours and will never be yours. 

My personal bond connecting my history and cultural memory to Israel has been severed by the racist apartheid policies of that government. But in my adopted home, zombie white supremacy, an increasingly visible, dangerous and aggressive segment of this nation of white European immigrants, staking a claim to this land above anyone else, is now with rising brutality resuscitating and delivering a murderous message of ownership with a knee to the neck, further severing my bond to this land in the process.

Looking at the American republic, dangling as it is now between the life and death, the racist undead, led by the foremost zombie of our time, Donald Trump, remind us of an incomplete national initiation. There is nothing about Trump to suggest any history of formative, let alone transformative development, no true home, allegiance to anything or any distraction from singleminded and empty devotion to personal gain. And likewise, his most ardent followers feel entitled to demand and accept nothing less than unobstructed freedom of their personal choices without much suggestion of a commitment to anything other than that freedom–such as the common interest. 

America’s initiation on the issue of race is entering the encounter-with-death phase. Trump’s zombie cult, the uninitiated, reflect to the rest of us how severed we are from our ancestor’s bones. America is still way behind the curve of truly becoming Emma Lazarus’s home to the many. It’s primarily a home to the few whose dominance depends on successfully claiming—and selling—the idea of America as their exclusive home. The message delivered to communities of color are that they are temporary residents with shallow roots at best, at constant risk of being attacked, marginalized, incarcerated, exploited, oppressed, exported, discarded and finally, if necessary, killed. America is now being dragged into the mud of history by the undead. The world looks on in horror.

The racist undead have never been alive in the sense of recognizing interdependence as a primal reality of existence. Nor do they recognize or consider themselves beholden to any resident spirits. Even their god is homeless. Grounding to a place and to all people is not embedded in modern American culture; thus, no common vision exists of what it means to live in the full flower of diversity we represent. Our roots are too shallow; our gods are foreign. We are driven by the ideology of self-interest. And if Trump’s ascendance is any indication, the zombies are winning.

What is so disturbing and ironic in these times is that those who claim to be Most American, the ones claiming ownership and to being the ‘true’ keepers of the only legitimate version of America, the ones lugging automatic weapons into statehouses, to polling places and into the street proclaiming their ‘freedom,’ the ones acting least like they believe in the promise of this nation, have the least invested in making sure all people share and contribute to the struggle of thriving together, most likely because it is they themselves who have been hollowed out and discarded by the America they claim to love. They are our zombie chickens coming home to roost, leaning into the nihilism of the chief zombie, Donald Trump.

The Global Violence Index

The relationship between the environmental movement and racism is clear. We’ve known this for a long time and it’s become even more important to articulate this view right now. The link between dehumanization, white supremacy, class war, religious bigotry, ethnic hatred, misogyny and climate change is straight. What’s been working in me for the last week or so is a further elaboration on this theme.

The fallacy of economic development fueled by cheap energy has always been that ecological damage is the externality not priced into the cost of that energy. It’s taken 150 years, but failing to account for that externality is what’s bringing us to the brink of extinction. Racism and slavery were (and are) the ignored human cost, the economic externality on which all of that national (and global) economic development depends. Continuing ecological externalities as well as the ongoing human costs of racism are each forms of violence. They lie at the center of the founding and building of this nation and at the center of the global phenomenon of colonialism and economic imperialism.

Colonialism and its neocolonial forms are racist and genocidal violence happening on a mass scale since the 17th century. Fortunately, the violence of slavery was overcome, but the violence of racism, ethnic hatred and continuing forms of economic slavery have held on, all of them fueling the capitalist ideology of Progress. All of them are founded on white supremacy. We may also categorize the industrial engine of capitalism as a violent machine wreaking havoc on social ecologies, biodiversity, polluting and destroying the oceans and the atmosphere.

It took us a long time to recognize and begin to throw off the violence of colonialism and racism, and even longer for us to fully grasp the economic and ecological violence of extraction, consumption and pollution. But it’s time to recognize the true and full consequences not only of continuing racial and ecological violence, but that these two, along with religious bigotry, misogyny and climate denial, driven by white supremacy and neoliberalism, are the singularity of global violence. They comprise what I am calling the Global Violence Index, measured as GHG emissions. This is the legacy of colonial and neocolonial racism.

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A deeply rooted vestigial tolerance of economic and human externalities is what begets sweatshops in Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, India and Thailand, a minimum wage stuck for 12 years at the same level, ten percent of the American workforce laboring for less than that, an offshore oil rig exploding in the Gulf of Mexico. They are all violence. Tar sands extraction and mountain top coal mining commit violence on the land and the waters. And let’s face it, rare earth mining for the lithium in our phones, EV batteries, military hardware and for an increasing number of appliances is also violence.

Displacement of indigenous peoples is violence, whether it’s the XL pipeline or the mega-hydropower projects of Asia, Africa or South America. Dams on the upper Mekong in China destroying downstream economies and ecologies are violence. Intellectual property laws, with complicit politicians, lawyers and trade organizations are legalized violence. Monsanto, forcing farmers worldwide to buy new seed annually, destroying native seed diversity and driving thousands of small farmers in India to suicide, is violence. Monoculture is violence. Multinationals conspiring to deprive workers of living wages, benefits and to further destroy environmental protections. All of this is violence. The gig economy is violence. Wage theft is violence. Food insecurity is violence. You get my point.

All of these practices have directly or indirectly driven the growth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The neoliberal machine has subjugated governments of developing nations, sown corruption and debt peonage. It is the modern engine of global inequality, committing economic violence, depriving nations of funds for education, infrastructure, health care and the social safety net, all while displacing peoples, undermining democratic institutions and wreaking ecological destruction. The Niger Delta might be Exhibit A. Hell, the USA, with rising levels of poverty, the unraveling of the social safety net, the degradation of education, healthcare, laws and practices, legal and illegal, excluding non-white people from equal opportunity, falling life expectancy, rising infant mortality and the massive class divide is Exhibit A+.

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Niger Delta

Domestically, the creation of sacrifice zones, placing dangerous, toxic and destructive installations in African-American, Latin and immigrant communities where people don’t have the economic and political power to resist is violence. Driving economic externalities into already externalized communities destroys their homes, their health and their safety. In a context of already denying livelihoods, wages, health benefits and decent education, communities of color also have to contend with these installations and their deadly products. Now we are gaming out the consequences of global climate change, the increasing impact of extreme climate events, the economic damage and the displacement they portend. We already know who will be most impacted.

America’s journey on the issue of race is entering a death-spiral phase, collapsing into fascism. As a nation of immigrants, having left (or been ripped from) the places where our ancestor’s bones are buried, there is an aspect to the American character that remains homeless. The economic regime’s casual destruction of Home arises from this deep spiritual emptiness. It extends to indigenous communities, such as in North Dakota or here in North Carolina with the placement of fossil fuel pipelines through sacred homelands. America is primarily a home to the few whose dominance depends on successfully selling the idea of America as white people’s exclusive home. This is the subliminal false narrative Trump sells in his deliberate and increasingly extreme efforts to retain control.

But all the colonial policies and practices here in the US, coupled with the occupying force of policing in indigenous and communities of color send a single message: this is not your home. The destructive and ultimately violent economy doesn’t respect our Home. The message of police violence in communities of color is that the social contact doesn’t matter when it comes to their lives, that they are merely temporary residents. Their right to Home and safety never existed and still doesn’t exist. Their adherence to the social contract doesn’t matter. It can be violated at will and mostly without consequence.  They can be attacked, marginalized, incarcerated, exploited, oppressed, exported, discarded and finally, if necessary, killed—mostly with impunity. And also, you can even be deprived of your vote on all of that.

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Ironically, COVID-19 has put a temporary stop to the engine of violence. Even while it was devastating the elderly and communities of color in this nation, the Index of Violence crashed. Ten years of gains in global GHG emissions have disappeared. The prospect of full recovery is slim. I’m not suggesting all commerce is violence; not at all. But the interruption of global supply chains, the radical reduction in transportation all contributed to this crash. The long-term prescription for economic recovery is identical to what we already know will reduce global emissions: re-localization, economic equity, the recovery of community, the simplification of supply chains, greater resilience to the coming climate impacts, all fueled by renewables. All of it portends a reduction in violence. All of it will reduce emissions.

So when we take to the streets, we are not solely fighting for racial justice. Justice is not only One Thing— it is Everything. It is the disruption, dismantling and removal of the legitimacy of inequality and white supremacy: the establishment of economic justice, ecological justice, cognitive justice, gender and generational justice. We are fighting to unravel the engine of violence. It is one fight. We are fighting for Home, for the only home we have, for the right to safety, for the fruits of our labor, for prosperity for all. It has taken great suffering and centuries of pain to realize this. Now we know and cannot ever un-know. Success will be reflected in lowering the Global Violence Index.