'The Black Experience' - Not Genocide?

   In class today, (as far as I understood,) someone characterized the oppression and abuse Latino people face as 'not genocide, but like the black experience in the U.S.' - or something to that effect. It seemed impossible to properly address the question without deviating from our conversation too much, but I think it may be worth unpacking. This may be self-evident, but this is not all a response to that one comment - I'm just using it as a jump-off point.

   To begin: without any textual grounding or personal experience, I object to the suggestion of a singular, universal black experience - particularly when asserted in refutation of contemporary/historic genocide in the U.S. Class, gender, region and countless other variables intersect in a multiplicity of individual and collective black experiences. That said, from legal slavery, to the convict-lease system (which some have argued is "worse than slavery,"), to state and vigilante jim crow terror, to the state-led flooding of heroin and crack into black neighborhoods, to the mass incarceration we face today, many African Americans lives have been -individually and collectively- damaged and destroyed.

   I argue that the state violence perpetrated in the era of each regime just listed, fulfills every criteria of genocide outlined the U.N. Before we go any further, if you think i'm being hyperbolic or dramatic, consider the following:

if what I'm saying is true, the corporate-state would do everything in its power to keep this information hidden from its domestic subjects, that's why this might be hard for us to take. (#Turkey)

Each permutation of genocide criteria versus mode of oppression deserves its own exploration, but I will attempt contextualize "the black experience" by discussing the convict-lease system, the idea of fact versus truth, and how each relates to genocidal interpretations of African American history.

                        "The Convention defines genocide as any of a number of acts committed with the intent to     destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

    Both proponents and reformers of the convict-lease system understood that most captives would die within a decade of their "sentences".  Mostly males of all ages were being sent to work to death for "crimes" such as vagrancy or theft of a small item. Keep in mind, reparations were not paid to slaves. The black codes were a series of laws which essentially criminalized black people for being off the plantation. It was an economic model through which capitalists and the state collaborated to rebuild the post-bellum south with free black labor. However, these people were no longer literal property, and so their was no vested interest in keeping them healthy or alive. As Oshinksky describes in Worse than Slavery, not only were they worked to death for the material luxury of others, but they were forced into the most deplorable conditions imaginable - conditions that a slave-owner would not risk damaging property in, "When the Greenville Railroad needed workers to lay track in the scorching heat of the Yazoo Delta, it subleased convicts. When the Mississippi Central needed men to dynamite a tunnel near Kosciusko, it subleased convicts. When the New Orleans and Northeastern needed labor to clear a malarial swamp south of hattiesburg, it subleased convicts at a premium daily rate of $1.75 a head. According to witnesses, the men were chained for days in knee-deep pools of muck, 'their thirst driving them to drink the water in which they were compelled to deposit their excrement,'" (p.45) They worked full-day shifts of 16+ hours with physical abuse instead of food and water. At night, convicts often slept in a single, overcrowded cage. Oshinsky describes a physician outrage by, "'the filthy conditions of the convict cage': blood-stained dirt flow, overflowing waste buckets, and vermin-covered walls…In the 1880s, the annual mortality rate for Mississippi's convict population ranged from 9 to 16 percent…Not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of ten years or more," (p.46) It's important to keep in mind what's happening to African American's fortunate enough to avoid these state-corporate death camps. In Mississippi, which national press began to refer to as the "lynching state," a lawyer observed that, "dead men [are] literally hanging from the boughs of trees by every roadside," (p.4)

   Why is this history relevant to conversations about Genocide in the U.S.? As the title of Oshinsky's book suggests, life for black people in America did not unilaterally improve in the wake of nominal freedom; it requires more than time for conditions to improve. The civil rights movement did not end because racial equality was achieved - it was forcibly stopped when lawmen at all levels infiltrated, murdered, and imprisoned the most powerful and influential black leaders (#killing members of the group;causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group); It is but one chapter of the modern black freedom struggle.

   Let's consider the parallels between nominal genocide (#Tracey's G-word), and nominal freedom/democracy.

Both are words controlled by people with power (politicians/military contractors/corporate media)- People with vested economic and political interest in maintaing genocidal tactics and keeping the truth invisible. In his piece From Slavery to Mass Incarceration Wacquant identifies, "the blatant contradiction between human bondage and democracy," (p.45) As We've discussed the topic of 'modern genocide' at great length - should we not think about post-modern genocide? Wacquant continues, "unlike slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto of mid-century, it [the current racial system] does not carry out a positive economic mission of recruitment and disciplining of the workforce: it serves only to warehouse the precarious and deproletarianized fractions of the black working class, be it that they cannot find employment owing to a combination of skills deficit employer discrimination and competition from immigrants, or that they refuse to submit to the indignity of substandard work in the peripheral sectors of the service economy  - what ghetto residents label 'slave jobs.'" (p.54) What does this look like to people in other countries, whether or not they're oppressed by American policies?

   The night following a prison justice conference, a few peers and I went to a bar. As we were leaving, a man bummed a cigarette and asked what brought us to the city. After hearing that we, rich-looking, white kids were there on work for 'prison justice', he told us a few things that we 'had to know'.

He framed African American history through a series of close analogies to the decimation of indigenous peoples on this continent. He drew parallels between reservations and housing projects (forced dependency/confinement), crack&heroin versus alcohol&disease (addiction, submission, disorganization, death, justification of criminality), and cops, cowboys, and lynch mobs. This man survived the guns, drugs, and incarceration our corporate-state designed to placate and kill him. He recognizes his experiences, in the broader context of his people's experiences, in terms of a concept that can be difficult to grapple with; he calls it genocide.Who are we to say that he is wrong?

   This is a good example of the limitations of constructing a history composed of documented, and "objective fact". Declassified, official documents state that the free breakfast programs operated the Black Panthers were the greatest domestic threat (#deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part) ; another fact, found in Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement cites civil-rights-era veteran Fannie Lou Hamer, in testifying that "60 percent of black women who passed through Sunflower City Hosiptal in her hometown in Mississippi were sterilized, many without their Knowledge (# imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group)- Fannie Lou Hamer was one such victim; fact: mothers lose full custody of their children for non-violent drug offenses, and even less (#forcibly transferring children of the group to another group)

Lemkin coined the term in order for people to recognize unthinkable and vastly disproportionate violence between any two groups of oppressed and oppressor, not to provoke exercises in theoretical taxonomy. My final question is, with all that we know, who benefits from withholding genocide terminology from the treatment of people of color in the U.S.?

As Fox Moulder from X-files says, the truth is out there.