Juneteenth
[CW: slavery, white supremacy, violence]
I had a long-form rambling blog post here about Juneteenth that I ultimately didn't like the tone or arrangement of. But I did like some of its content, so I'll try to reproduce that here in a significantly shorter, hopefully more-readable point-form post.
0. Preface
1. Institutions
2. History
I had a long-form rambling blog post here about Juneteenth that I ultimately didn't like the tone or arrangement of. But I did like some of its content, so I'll try to reproduce that here in a significantly shorter, hopefully more-readable point-form post.
0. Preface
- Today is an important commemoration day for the nominal end of slavery in America.
- Reflecting on that as a white person, in today's new-found white interest in racism discourse, makes me think of a couple things I'm seeing in the writing of fellow whites that are a bit off, so I'm going to write about them here.
- Two things are: institutions and history.
- Not trying to derail from present emphasis on police brutality, will in fact buttress that; but also think the most-present aspects of that are well-covered elsewhere and the dimensions I want to discuss are important parts of what I see in Black discourse about racism that are being consciously or unconsciously neglected in white discourse about racism.
1. Institutions
- Institutions exist. If you can take one point from this post, take that. Part of neoliberal political propaganda is to deny their existence in order to obscure the function of those that favour the ruling class and undermine those that favour the lower classes. If you ever see yourself saying "there are no institutions, only individuals" you are parroting this propaganda.
- Example institutions: governments, policing, justice and legal systems; military systems; banks, corporations, markets and economic systems; schools and universities; hospitals, doctors, health authorities and psychiatric systems.
- Institutions have individual actors within them but they are independent of their individuals; they have constitutive physical, legal, financial, and bureaucratic form that greatly outlives and exerts much greater collective power than any individual.
- The term "systemic racism" is not a synonym for "ubiquitous individual racism" (which is a separate and real problem); it is a synonym for "institutional racism" and refers to racism that is embedded within the constitutive forms of the institution as much or more than it refers to any individuals associated with the institution. Focusing on indivuals is, again, repeating political propaganda that seeks to obscure the function of the institution.
- Specifically: the policies and records held in an institution can be (and often are) racist without any ongoing human effort. They are documents (or database rows) with their own force, part of the institution itself. Changing an institution at that level requires changing the policies and records. When someone asks to see institutional change, and gives a list of policy-change demands, and is then met with a promise that there will be changes to individuals or staff, that is missing the demand. Policy changes are required.
- Besides policy changes (which address current and future wrongs), changing records also matters in order to address past wrongs. Records record what happened in the past and if that was wrong, the records are wrong. When someone calls for purging criminal records of people wrongly prosecuted, or granting citizenship to people wrongly excluded from it, or transferring land or money back to people it was stolen from, they are talking about modifying institutional records to address past wrongs. This is sensible and again if it's met with only a promise to change individuals on staff, the point is being missed.
2. History
- To understand which past wrongs need changing in which institutions, one needs to read some history. I've written about this before and I want to reiterate that it's just a generally good habit as a citizen to read history and expand and adjust your politics as you learn how we got to where we are.
- June 19, 1865 is an illustrative day to anchor some history-study on. It's worth considering both the events before it and the events after it.
- In terms of events before 1865: it is worth reading about when slavery was legal in America (and more broadly the continuation of the process of imperial theft of the Americas). Read about the size of the Atlantic slave trade, the 12 million people torn from their homes over 400 years. Read about the mass death of the middle passage and the treatment of slaves in the places they were taken to. Read about the continuous rebellions and successful national revolution.
- Further, read about the process of institutionalizing slavery in America. The creation of a hereditary legal class. Of a constitution that provides for federal policing of fugitive slaves. Of the formal political power of the slaveocracy of the time. Of fortunes (and thus production facilities, companies, markets and economies) built on slave labor. Of anti-literacy laws and institutional prohibition of slave education. Of arguments for the legitimacy of the system, and the willingness to declare a separate country and fight an entire civil war to preserve (and even expand) those institutions.
- In terms of events after 1865: it is worth reading about the century of hardship following the formal abolition of slavery in America, and what persisted and changed in those altered circumstances. Especially institutions. Read about how the 13th amendment institutionalized a loophole of penal slavery, expanding the convict leasing system. Read about the growth in Black codes and Jim Crow laws violently limiting free movement, marriage, public space and transport, schooling and higher education, voting, military service, property ownership, financial services and labor. Read about the informal institutions of white vigilante violence, and the resulting terror-apartheid state that motivated the Great Migration of six million Black Americans north and west from former slave states. Read about how this migration was met in the north and west both with white supremacist terrorism and riots, and also further institutional policy wrongs of exclusionary housing covenants and redlining.
- Finally it is worth reading about the civil rights movement and the post-1968 changes to institutions: at least a few of the racist institutional policies that persisted or grew in the aforementioned Jim Crow era were repealed, but were immediately met with sudden and dramatic expansion of incarceration, the massive and racist new War on Drugs, and the growth of a private, for-profit prison-industrial complex, ensuring the effective continuation to this day of a class of slave labor in America.
- All this reading should call into question the numerous surviving policies and records of institutions involved. Both the lack of positive records -- rights, titles, jobs, degrees, money, property -- that have been institutionally denied or diminished over the centuries of each institution's existence, and also the excess of negative records -- criminalization, debt, and their combined effective enslavement -- in other institutions. It is reasonable to want to right the wrongs in many of those records.