“The problem with the United States of America,” someone once told me, “is that it hasn’t had a renaissance.”
And there are few nations in quite so much need of a rebirth.
Some are surprised that cops are flashing white power signs on the streets of New York; that journalists are being tear gassed in Los Angeles; that Hollywood stars have been pepper sprayed in Chicago.
But the US was founded, 400 years ago this year by the Mayflower Pilgrims, on the idea of supremacy.
Specifically, white, Protestant supremacy. What happened in Minneapolis last week, when George Floyd was murdered by a cop kneeling on his neck despite begging for his life, despite witnesses, despite camera phones, started at Plymouth Rock in 1620 when 35 radical fundamentalists decided it was theirs.
Those first settlers called themselves ‘Saints’, and the 70 or so labourers they took with them to do the hard work were ‘Strangers’. Little has changed in a nation where there is still a strict class divide of ‘us’ and ‘them’.
‘Them’ could be black, Latino, female, immigrant, Muslim. In the words of Morris Chestnut, the actor who played a solitary black recruit in GI Jane: “To them, you’re just the new n***** on the block, that’s all.”
(Image: First Independent Films)
Near that first settlement – which witnessed starvation, cannibalism, the importation of novel viruses, and Biblical levels of racism towards Native Americans who first befriended and later had to defend themselves against the incomers – is a hill on which the white settlers buried their dead. On it is a sign for visitors, which reads “as you walk through Burial Hill, please remember that this is historic and sacred ground, which deserves care and respect”.
Two thousand miles away, construction crews have dynamited Native American burial grounds to build Donald Trump’s border wall, because it is more important to keep ‘them’ out than it is to allow the American Dream to be dreamt by ‘Strangers’.
The first settlers were separatists, hounded out of England and then Holland for being too mad and religious for the madly-religious 17th century Europeans. They sought a place of their own, not to be a beacon of freedom that would shine through the ages, but to guarantee their own liberty, their own plenty, and their own sense of rightness.
When others arrived in their wake, seeking freedoms of their own, they weren’t given them. Quakers were denounced as witches, Catholics and Jews drummed out of town, the Irish considered a social disease. The Salem Witch Trials which came just 70 years after the Mayflower were the natural result of an insular, crazed, argumentative, begrudging, and ignorant community which mistrusted and denounced everyone, inside and outside it. They read just the one book, but they didn’t get it.
With the merciful breadth of a whole ocean between us, it looks like little has changed. They’re so busy arguing over who owns the place they’ve forgotten land is only ever borrowed, and continued tenancy is contingent upon being a good caretaker.
Of course the big white guy wants to run the place, and thinks he can do what he likes. Of course the poorer, darker, hungrier people have got their backs up. That’s what happens when you behave like it’s still the 17th century.
And it’s no surprise that, once again, they’re eating each other.
(Image: REUTERS)
People of colour are protesting, both peacefully and unpeacefully. White protesters are joining them, most for the best of reasons. Good cops are taking a knee, bad cops are shooting rubber bullets at people peacefully stood on their own front porch. Among it all are white supremacists, rallying the pond slime, joining the riots, lighting the fires, doing whatever it takes to provoke a war they think they can win.
Top of the pile is an obese slug of a man, subject of more sexual assault claims than the average friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who until now has merely been entertainingly appalling. Despite being too big and brave to wear a mask which would help the safety of others, he spent last night cowering in a bunker and pissing all over the definition of anti-fascism, which helps only the safety of fascists.
The Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, in which a wealthy black neighbourhood was torched and the inhabitants massacred in a crime barely to be found in US school history books, were bad. Forcibly removing thousands of Native Americans from fertile lands to barren ones between 1830 to 1850 was inhuman. Martin Luther King was a non-violent, Christian voice assassinated by more than one supremacist who could not stand the fact he was proving them wrong.
But a president claiming to be protecting George Floyd’s name, while calling for the military to shoot people protesting his death, really takes the biscuit.
There is 400 years of this racist sewage, festering beneath every aspect of modern American life. They’ve had the benefits of humanity’s scientific and technological advancements since 1620, same as us, but managed none of the self-analysis.
White supremacists have been making the USA worse since 1620, so it might be an idea to start arresting them, now. They can start by renaming the White House, and arresting the man who cowers in it. There must be a reckoning, and there must be justice.
Britain is still racist, in too many ways. But we question ourselves, all the time – after Brixton, after The Troubles, after WW2, and Iraq – and although change is creeping slow it comes from that reappraisal. Perhaps, at last, the USA is taking a long, hard look at itself, and deciding to change the things it does not like. But that rebirth could as easily be a renewed sense of superiority, as a nationwide admission that their future must be better than their past.
Flames satisfy anger, for a while. It is what grows in the ashes that makes all the difference.
