It’s March. Black History Month has come to an end, leaving us with eleven months to lay down more white history, skid marks and all, before we’re reminded once again of our propensity for hubris and brutality. If the institution of slavery is dead (i.e., “it’s history,”) I’m afraid the economic values still thrive that once allowed us to think it’s OK to own other people or determine their future.
This month, the Dakota Access
Pipeline will be completed without apology to the future or to the Standing
Rock Sioux, who had the juevos to claim their culture’s deeper ecological
understanding and their children’s rights to clean drinking water. This month, the site of their protest (on land
once theirs) will be drowned by the waters of a reservoir stored for urban
users downstream, another environmental manipulation with white fingerprints on
it. It’s hard for me to believe we can
still be so blind to these crimes, but there it is.
“Get out of my country,” a deranged
man yelled in a bar on the Kansas side of Kansas City last week before shooting
three men, two from India, killing one.
Officials did not immediately label this act a hate crime, perhaps because
the shooter’s state of derangement was already known. Age 51, he’s lived with his father his whole
life until his father died a year ago, devastating him; clearly he's someone who has not been able to
make his own way in this world. Those
two young men from halfway around the globe were not responsible for his lack of
place or standing, for his inability to function in this society, but they took
the hit for it.
“I want my country back,” my mother
used to say when the last George Bush was in office. Her sense of dispossession came from a
political hierarchy she didn’t believe in generating policies touted as
American that she couldn’t abide. She
had a white face to blame for her sense of loss, not black, brown or yellow,
but little more recourse than the man from Kansas City. Having an eight year reprieve helped, but now
she just leaves the television off.
“The country’s deeply divided,” we
hear over and over in the news without having the fault line mapped that
separates us. Week Four of the new
administration in Washington ended with President Trump claiming he’s on track
with what he wanted to accomplish. If
keeping the country deeply divided was on that list, he’s right. But I think what divides us goes deeper than
his hubris, and deeper than our mental constructs of race, ethnicity, even
class. I think it comes from land, the
source of all wealth: from who has
access to it and who doesn’t.
Near the beginning of his writing
career, Wendell Berry wrote a book about slavery called The Hidden Wound. It’s
really a long personal essay about the black people who were part of his
Kentucky tobacco farming family, including some held as slaves, and the cost to
whites of the divided consciousness inflicted by that system. But when I read the book, I came to realize
that racism is the excuse our minds create to explain why I (the so-called superior
person) should have land and you (the so-called inferior one,) shouldn’t. And if I, a white person, have become
dispossessed of land and/or the wealth derived from it, woe unto you less-than-white
people who still have a yard to call your own.
I think we don’t know the
divide. Is it race, or ethnicity, or
economic class and education – or is it something else that keeps separating us
into artificial categories which keep us fighting over straws? I think it’s Berry’s hidden wound and our
ignorance of land’s critical role in slashing our consciences. The wound’s scabs have been torn off so often
the flesh has not healed normally, but become scar tissue, proudflesh. I think our future is limited to making more
scar tissue until we address what made the initial cut.
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Trudy
Wischemann almost has finished editing a book of writings on land and water in
California. Anyone interested in this
topic can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
message below.
