"Didn't We Get Rid of Those People Years Ago?" Reflections on Empire/Uppit

[NVMojo]

You knew racism was alive and well in America today, right?

Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians ....

By TIM WISE

I should have known better than to listen in to the conversation immediately to my left, sitting as I was in the Northwest Airlines World Club, in Detroit. Unlike most of the folks who have paid their $450 for an annual membership--which entitles one to little more than some free booze, cheese, crackers and coffee, along with a comfy chair between flights--I am hardly, after all, the typical "business traveler." I usually spend my time in such places, hastily composing one or another radical screed (like this one), while waiting to fly somewhere to deliver a speech that will, in some small way, move forward the cause of social transformation.

snip....

But to the two men in the World Club, he was guilty of a lot more than that. To them, Churchill's most egregious crime was not having died, "like all the other Indians."

I shit you not. One of the men, fuming about the article that now has Ward facing down the barrel of a Board of Trustees looking for any reason to fire him, despite tenure, turned to the other and said: "Just when you thought we'd killed all the Indians, one pops up talkin' some shit like this, and reminds you that we didn't finish the job after all."

White guy number two laughs, in fact, damn near spits Dewar's and soda all over the leather barca lounger he's plopped down in, finding this affable romanticizing of genocide to be the funniest fucking thing he has apparently had the luxury of hearing, at least since the last time he and his buddies sat around in a sports bar, farting, and trading jokes about fags, or some such thing.

I was stunned, because just one day before, I had speculated, only half-seriously, during an interview with KPFK in Los Angeles, that this anti-Indian sentiment might lay beneath some of the vitriol aimed Ward's way. After all, the attacks on him have seemed so personal, so vicious, so much worse than even the histrionics normally leveled at white leftists like Chomsky, or Parenti, or Zinn, who said much the same thing about 9/11 after that fateful day. The bombast has seemed to include an unhealthy dose of racial resentment--absolute rage--at the notion that a person of color and an Indian no less, should dare to condemn the American empire.

"Didn't we get rid of those people years ago?" One can almost hear the refrain, as if broadcast from a loudspeaker.

"Goddamit, be silent," comes the stare from others, or the words themselves.

"Don't make us go all Trail of Tears on your ass. Don't make us send out those smallpox-infected blankets again. Remember, we still got some of that stuff in a vial at the Centers for Disease Control. Do NOT make us break that shit out, 'cuz we'll do it."

"Oh the ingratitude! Here we are, honoring your ancestors by naming sports mascots after your people, and this is how one of yours repays us? Oh, hell no, not today Chief!"


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http://www.counterpunch.org/wise02092005.html