"The Negro people fought back chiefly through the Populist parties that opposed the Wall Street trusts through the eighties and nineties of the last century. But their fight became more hopeless against the increased power of American monopoly. Terror was unleashed against them at home -- there were 1,955 recorded lynchings from 1889 through 1901, according to the minimal count of Tuskegee Institute. Side by side went terror unleashed abroad, as American imperialism entered the international arena by subjugating the Filipino, Puerto Rican and Cuban peoples and reduced many Latin-American countries to economic and political vassalage.
It was during this period of American imperialist adventure abroad that most of the state laws segregating Negroes and illegally denying them the vote were enacted in the Southern states. Disfranchisement laws were passed in Louisiana in 1898, in North Carolina and Alabama in 1901, Virginia, 1902, Georgia, 1908, Oklahoma, 1910. They but codified what was taking place in life. They disfranchised poor whites as well as Negroes, thus breaking the Populist movement. It was during this period, too, in which Negroes still had a remnant of political power, that the spurious charge of rape was elevated into an institution, an extralegal political instrument for terrorizing all Negroes, particularly those demanding their rights under the Constitution. With the charge of rape, reaction sought to justify its bestiality and to divorce from the Negroes those white allies who had helped to carry out the democratic practices of Reconstruction.
In November, 1898, during the Spanish-American War, Colonel A.M. Wadell said in North Carolina, according to the Raleigh News & Observer 2 that "we are resolved" to win the elections in Wilmington, North Carolina, "if we have to choke the current of Cape Fear with carcasses. The time for smooth words has gone by, the extremest limit of forebearance has been reached." Five days later the Colonel led an armed force against the Negro-white administration of Wilmington, slaughtered scores, and announced himself the new mayor. The Government gave silent assent.
In 1900, when both men and newspapers spoke less circuitously than they do today, the San Francisco Argonaut said: "We do not want the Filipinos. We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich, but, unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos. There are many millions there and it is to be feared their extinction will be slow." 3 In the same vein and in the same year Senator Tillman of South Carolina took the floor of the United States Senate and announced: "We took the government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot Negroes! We are not ashamed of it!" 4"
See: http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
Hi Joya, I was astonished and stunned by the facts and photos you have presented last night. I am sad to see that despite the cultural genocide committed on African Americans, still it is embedded into the society through disproportionalities and depriviations, as well as labellings persistent first in academia, then in other institutions as well. Being a Criminal Justice student gave me opportunity to realize that even literature in CJS is divided between African American scholars that provide more clear and lucid picture of what is really going on in depriviated areas. Whereas, other stream not only denounces the real facts about crime, but also there is censure on African American literature in Crime and Justice Studies. I want to appreciate for enlightening me and the class about the matter. I fully support you, and encourage you to continiue endeavor you are pursuing to bring the light to the TRUTH. Because academicians are not paid scholars, we are guardians of the TRUTH. Best Regards Meho Buljubasic mbuljuba@kent.edu
ReplyDeleteHi Joya,
ReplyDeleteI've been having trouble submitting a comment on your blog. I tried
signing up to a google account but it was coming back as an error. I'll
try again later. But anyways, here's my response to "Lemkin's Moral
Obligation." Like I said, I'll eventually get situated and post this
online, but for the time being I'd like you to have it. Also, the article
I mention is attached, FYI.
Lemkin’s “moral duty” and his myopic dismissal of the claims made in We
Charge Genocide reveal an inherent problem with the study of genocide.
Identity politics are intrinsic to this field, insofar as they reflect and
are shaped by institutional and/or group interests. Dirk Moses explained
in a seminal 2002 contribution how the relationship between genocide
studies and the Holocaust has been marred by competing claims of
victimhood, whereby virulent bickering has persisted over which particular
group’s experience was bigger or worse than the other’s. Such polemics
buttress the “conceptual blockages” which limit a critical theorization of
genocide. [See A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional
Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the
Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7-36. See attached]
One can very much see those conceptual blockages at play in Lemkin’s
response to We Charge Genocide.
The interests Lemkin was implicitly defending were not only the moral
obligations he felt that he owed to his mother. Institutionally, he felt
that he was protecting the best interests of “his baby,” the Convention,
which of course your research has so eloquently revealed. Quite simply,
Lemkin felt that the issues raised in We Charge Genocide were a political
liability that threatened “his baby.” As such, they were expendable and
thus dismissed. A similar process is apparent in my own research on
Lemkin’s studies of North American Indigenous peoples. One reason why I
think he never followed through with his research in this area was because
he felt that there was nothing politically to be gained by doing so.
Indeed, his entire research agenda for his unfulfilled global history of
genocide was based on political motives. He wanted to publish this
historiographical work only because it would have furthered the prospects
of “his baby.”
This tension between politics and academics underpinned Lemkin’s entire
life works. Since him, the field of genocide studies has mythologized
Lemkin, raising him to the status of sainthood, and ignoring all of the
contradictions and conflicts that plagued his work. It is interesting,
because when Dirk Moses proposed his idea of “conceptual blockages,” he
was implicitly pointing to Lemkin as a way out from the mess. In that
sense, Moses was perpetuating Lemkin’s mythological status. (Although, to
be fair, Moses has since turned more critical of Lemkin.) Your work, Joya,
is necessary for so many reasons, at least one of which is to expose
Lemkin’s own “conceptual blockages.”
Jeff
jmbenven@pegasus.rutgers.edu