Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico

By Ishmael Reed

The War of Rebellion still divides the United States. Some rebel generals, whom the famous pro-confederate propaganda film "Gone With The Wind" referred to as "Knights," earned their massacre bona fides by murdering thousands of blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans. The "Knight" Robert E. Lee fought children during the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847. The children, Los nios heroes, refused to surrender and were slaughtered. The subjects addressed in this book include white nationalism, Donald Trump, Quentin Tarantino and Django, the musical Hamilton, Ferguson, Missouri, Amiri Baraka, a different take on #metoo, the one-at-a-time tokenism of an elite, who chooses winners and losers among minority artists, the Alt-Right, the use of immigrants to shame black America, and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771862028

Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed (b. 1938) is an acclaimed multifaceted writer whose work often engages with overlooked aspects of the American experience. He has published ten novels, including Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo, as well as plays and collections of essays and poetry. He was nominated for a National Book Award in both poetry and prose in 1972. Conjure (1972), a volume of poetry, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his New and Collected Poems: 1964–2006 (2007) received a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Reed has also received a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Blues Song Writer of the Year award from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame, a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the National Institute for Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Reed taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for thirty-five years and currently lives in Oakland, California.      

Book preview

Ishmael Reed

WHY NO CONFEDERATE

STATUES IN MEXICO

Baraka Books

Montréal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

© Ishmael Reed

ISBN 978-1-77186-185-4 pbk; 978-1-77186-202-8 epub; 978-1-77186-203-5 pdf

Cover illustration: Vincent Partel

Book Design by Folio infographie

Editing and proofreading: Carla Blank, Robin Philpot

Legal Deposit, 4th quarter 2019

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Contents

Introduction

To Exterminate or Extirpate

Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico

Part 1 A.

Part 1 B.

Part 1 C.

Part 2

Part 3 – Politics

Part 4-Culture

Part 1

Land of Fluid Identities

1

The Berryessas and Peraltas, Descendants of the California Resistance*

2

The Wrong Side of History. Who’s Next? Are Gays the New Blacks?*

3

How I Became a Black Bogeyman and Survived to Tell the Tale

Patriarchs and their surrogates profit from Black Bogeymanism

Sources

Part 2

Culture

4

Black Audiences, White Stars and Django Unchained*

5

Is Boardwalk Empire Trampling the Legacy of Marcus Garvey?*

6

Hamilton, An American Musical: Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders … and It’s Not Halloween*

7

Hamilton: The Revolution. Brilliant Show. Bad History

8

Before the President There Was Mr. Tibbs*

9

Personal Problems – Interview by Violet Lucca, March 30, 2018

Film Comment

10

Buried Alive*

11

Mother Hubbard Goes to China*

12

LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Me*

13

Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Their Creations and the Reason Jazz Survives*

Works Cited

14

Sex, Africa and Chinua Achebe*

15

My Oldest White Friend, Oliver Clark: From U.B. to Broadway and Hollywood

Part 3

Politics

17

Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency

References

16

Who Owns Black Opinion?

18

Trump’s Anti-Black Animus and How the Media Armed His Hate*

19

Using Immigrants to Shame American Blacks*

20

Confessions of a Neighborhood Watch Captain*

21

White Nationalism’s Last Stand*

22

Trump’s Irish-Americans Without Hearts*

23

Do American Jews Still Believe They’re White?*

24

Why We’re Shocked by White Heroin Use*

25

Amid Mount Rushmore Warriors, Why Not a lover: Warren G. Harding?*

Part 4

Culture

26

A Fly On Nicholas Kristof’s Wall*

27

Fly On The Wall – Bad Apples Bar*

28

Fly On The Wall – Governor Huckabee Meets Beyoncé*

Notes

Introduction. To Exterminate or Extirpate

2. The Wrong Side of History. Who’s Next?

6. Hamilton, An American Musical: Black Actors Dress Up like Slave Traders … and It’s Not Halloween

13. Jazz Musicians as Pioneer Multi-Culturalists, the Co-Optation of Their Creations and the Reason Jazz Survives

16. Who Owns Black Opinion?

17. Fallacies of the Post-Race Presidency

21. White Nationalism’s Last Stand

This book is dedicated to the memory of Joe Overstreet, Carl Tillman, Joyce Carol Thomas, Ray Smith, Randy Weston, Charles Harris, Ntozake Shange, and Bharati Mukherjee, and Dori Maynard.

Introduction

To Exterminate or Extirpate

On October 4, 2018, The New York Times reported that mass graves have been covered up by American schools at all levels. The mob attack in Tulsa has been called one of the worst instances of racial violence in American history, yet for decades, memories of the vicious event were suppressed—it was rarely mentioned in history books, taught in classrooms or discussed publicly. Americans get their history from filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and playwrights like Lin-Manuel Miranda in which mass murderers and slave salesmen are heroized. From television shows like Boardwalk Empire, where Marcus Garvey was depicted as a drug dealer. On a more highbrow level, the elite get their history from Jon Meacham, who doesn’t know how long slavery lasted.1

In the Times report, the mass graves held Blacks, but other mass graves hold Native-Americans, and in the West, add Latinx and Chinese. Thanks to an upheaval in the American Historical establishment, where the rear guard is being challenged by Black, Latinx, Native-American and Asian-American historians, we’re uncovering the stench of the American past. One of those is Julia Flynn Siler, author of The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She exposes a slave trade that existed after the official ending of slavery.

"Shockingly, auctions of Chinese women took place openly on the docks, in full view of policemen and the waterfront crowds, writes Siler. But as San Francisco began to shed its frontier coarseness and more women began to settle there, these human sales were moved to less public locations. One of these was called the Queen’s Room. This was a bitterly ironic name, because the Queen’s Room was far from royal and wasn’t even a room. Essentially an outdoor paddock for the women—or, in the now archaic term, a barracoon—it was used for the temporary confinement of slaves or prisoners. ‘The girls and women were critically examined after the fashion of African slave-dealers not many years ago,’ wrote one contemporary observer. Maybe the symbol of our country should be the vulture instead of the eagle.

Since the beginning of the European phase of North American history, the attitude toward those groups considered undesirable has been to exterminate, using the word of Jefferson and Jackson or to extirpate, George Washington’s word. (Political commentator Thom Hartmann even suggests that these words are euphemism for the word, murder.) Because of modern communications, Washington and Hamilton, who praised the leader of a vigilante mob for slaughtering savages, men, women and children, and worst of all Andrew Jackson, can’t go on their genocidal romps. Their descendants have come up with something called genthanasia, the non-violent weeding out of undesirables. The treatment of brown children at the border is an example of this policy of benign extermination." Children as young as seven and eight, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, said those who visited. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.

There is a stench, said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, one of the lawyers who visited the facility. ‘The overwhelming majority of children have not bathed since they crossed the border.’ (New York Times, 21 June 2019).

Having failed to achieve victory through violent means, and guided by beneficiaries of Nazi-financed research like that of Charles Murray, the white supremacists have resorted to subtler means, which two of its thought leaders, Richard Spencer and Raymond B. Cattell, refer to as non-violent ethnic cleansing. Cattell never repudiated his support for Nazi eugenics or the genthanasia, which proposes the nonviolent elimination of undesirable races. Genthanasia forms a guideline for those who are using Trump as the vulgar hawker for this evil philosophy.

Genthanasia takes the form of placing an embargo on supplies that were promised to Puerto Rico, leading to 4,000 deaths. Poisoning of water in Flint, like creating smallpox epidemics among Indian tribes. Predictably, the bureaucratic rogues who were responsible for lead poisoning have had their convictions overturned by a friendly Colonial court. Genthanasia includes slavery with a different name, like private prisons where inmates are forced to work or starve. Where the deaths of prisoners are withheld from the public. The withholding of adequate housing, leading to disease-ridden street living noted in the headlines of USNews (23 April 2019), The Homeless Are Dying in Record Numbers on the Streets of Los Angeles. The assigning of Black and Latinx children to the service industries and placing a freeze upon their opportunity to advance by criminalizing pre-school and grade school students and applying suspensions to black and brown students in a disproportionate manner. One could add the administration’s denial of global warming, which is leading to thousands of deaths in the global south, nations that did not cause the problem. The U.S. is the Biggest Carbon Polluter in History.2 The Department of Health and Human Services reports that blacks, browns and reds bear the brunt of health hazards from living in toxic neighborhoods. Under the heading, More likely to live near polluting industries and breathe polluted air, African-Americans are three times as likely to die from asthma-related causes than white Americans. What else is this but another example of slow-motion extermination? Such actions against blacks, browns and reds indicate that the thinkers, hidden from the public and who finance pundits and publications, will go to any lengths to fulfill the desire of the founders and the Pilgrims, to create a white land ordained by God.

Opposed to the idea of the United States as a White homeland has often been a multicultural coalition. Blacks, Native and Irish-Americans bonded in a fight against the British on March 5, 1770. One of those killed during this Boston Massacre was Crispus Attucks, half black and half Wampanoag, descendant of the tribe that was nearly exterminated by the Puritan white supremacists. John Adams, hero of fossil-fuels-endowed television, defended the Redcoats. He reminded the jury of that fateful night in early March when the ‘motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars’ pelted the redcoats with rocks all while daring them to fire.3

Another interracial alliance, blacks, Choctaws and Seminoles, established a free community at Negro Fort, which was located in Florida. The fort was becoming a growing threat to slavery itself. The existence of an autonomous free black community was intolerable alone, but it became a rallying point for runaway slaves fleeing from other Southern states.4 The blacks were less concerned about committing depredations—a term used by U.S. military officials—than they were about protecting their freedom. Andrew Jackson lied about the purpose of the fort because he wanted to destroy this threat to slavery. I have no doubt that this fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of murder, rapine, and plunder, and that it ought to be blown up regardless of the ground it stands on. If you have come to the same conclusion, destroy it and restore the stolen Negroes and property to their rightful owners.5 Jackson applied his extermination policy to the blacks and Native Americans who were living in a communal society. The image of this mass murderer embraces the twenty-dollar bill, while the current Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, a Jew who fronts for an anti-Semitic government, fawns before his racist leader’s opinion that placing Harriet Tubman, who liberated 300 slaves, is an act of political correctness. Tells you something about a country where white supremacists and slave holders like Andrew Jackson and Alexander Hamilton are honored while an honor to someone who liberated slaves is delayed. Like his admirer Donald Trump, Jackson exceeded the power delegated to him, attacking the fort before receiving the approval of President Monroe. A contemporary account:

Overall, exactly nine cannonball shots were fired at the fort on a morning in July, 1816. That was all it took. The ninth and final shot was a ‘hot shot,’ which had been held to a flame long enough that it was smoldering. By a stroke of pure luck, that ninth shot entered into a window of the fort and struck a gunpowder magazine. In different accounts, the explosion that followed was described as ‘that of a hundred thousand cannons,’ and as the largest explosion that the Americas had ever known. The explosion could be heard and felt as far away as Pensacola, 100 miles away. Over 270 escaped slaves and natives died immediately in the blast, according to official military dispatches.6

In one battle against Indians, Jackson, the Rock Star, ordered a butchery of his former allies, the Creek. The murders went on for hours. According to Jackson, he wanted to exterminate the Creek resistance fighters. By sundown, well over 800 Red Stick warriors lay dead on the field or sunk in watery graves. Jackson’s losses, by comparison, amounted to a mere 49, making the day’s death ratio a startling 17 to 1. In the battle’s aftermath, a local Creek Indian reported that perhaps ‘not more than ten Red Sticks escaped from the horseshoe’ alive to ‘tell the tale of the slaughter.’7

It was noted that Never before or since in the history of the United States have so many American Indians met death in a single military conflict. With their country decimated by war, and their people lingering on the brink of extinction, the remnants of the once mighty Creek Confederacy sued for peace at the Treaty of Fort Jackson, agreeing to cede over 23 million acres of their ancient homeland to the United States government. This land became the state of Alabama.

Andrew Jackson, the role model for Donald Trump, under whose regime thousands of children called immigrants have been placed in internment camps and cages, even though their ancestors occupied the Southwest and California before his mother came from Scotland in 1929, would approve of Trump’s actions.

In another face off against white supremacists, an alliance of blacks, Irish and immigrants called the St. Patrick’s Battalion (Los San Patricios), led by John Riley, faced the white supremacist invaders of Mexico. Appalled by the atrocities committed by the Americans, which included future leaders of a suicidal rebellion, they joined the Mexican forces.

Leaders like Rev. Henry Garnet and Frederick Douglass knew what these Southerners were up to in Mexico because in Douglass’ case, he had been beaten by Rebels and was familiar with their decadence and cruelty.

Garnet argued that there was no escaping the fact that the United States had an imperial plan to spread slavery everywhere it went…. The propagators of American slavery are spending their blood and treasure, that they may plant the black flag in the heart of Mexico and riot in the halls of the Montezumas.8

Douglass said, You know as well as I do, that Faneuil Hall has resounded with echoing applause of a denunciation of the Mexican war, a murderous war—as a war against the free States—as a war against freedom, against the Negro, and against the interests of workingmen of this country—and as a means of extending that great evil and damning curse, negro slavery.9

The coalition of blacks and immigrants fought a white supremacist army led by Robert E. Lee, which was followed by John Brown’s leading a diverse coalition against white supremacists at Harper’s Ferry, one of the events that triggered the War of Rebellion. A mixed-race people called Californios resisted the invaders of California, which included killers of the Navajo like Kit Carson. These brave resisters beat the invaders twice during the battle of Los Angeles.

In the 1960s, the diversity coalition defeated Southern white supremacists without firing a shot and that same coalition is now fighting the last hope of those who insist upon a white nation, who, failing to achieve the dream that evaded the Puritans and the segregated South have become so desperate that they elected Donald Trump president. The white nationalist forces may win a victory from time to time but, ultimately, they will be defeated.

Like the diversity coalitions that opposed white supremacists in the past, I am a member of a coalition of Black, Latinx, Italian-American, Irish-American, and Jewish-American writers, whose aim is to uncover the neglected cultural and historical record of the United States, no matter how ugly it might be. Our main program is The American Book Awards, with which we have challenged the monopoly that Neo-Europeans have over choosing winners and losers among ethnic writers, leading to a tokenism, a one-or-two-at-a-time-ism that has smothered the achievements of a variety of writers. Though our board includes a Booker prize winner, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, the current U.S. Poet Laureate and a MacArthur Fellow, we do not receive the mainstream media attention that is accorded The National Book Awards and The Pulitzer Prize, whose leadership isn’t as diverse as ours. The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976.

Since the collapse of the black press, which was considered so subversive at one time that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, wanted to charge the publishers with sedition, the billionaires who own most of the media have had an opportunity to create a clique of negro whisperers, like the Puritans selected a praying Indian, named Squanto who brought them news about the goings-on in the Native resistance community. Though social media are being condemned by lethargic corporate pundits and journalists, like Booker T. Washington’s grapevine telegraph, a strategy used by the slaves to communicate information, using social media, blacks are able to pass news that is neglected by the corporate media, especially cerebral victories like some ghetto youths winning a national chess championship.

Wicked was the part of the vocabulary of the Puritans, self- righteous hypocrites who left Amsterdam because of its cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. Just as the school curriculum ignores the atrocity committed by a white mob against black citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma, erased almost entirely from the American curriculum, and media, is the genocide committed against the indigenous people who greeted the newcomers to America, the Pilgrims.

The encounter between the Massachusetts Indians and the Pilgrims is represented in popular culture by images of Indians and Pilgrims exchanging turkeys and pumpkin pies, when the war between the Pilgrims and indigenous people whom they encountered, which the colonists called King Philip’s War, the name given to Metacomet, the chief of the Wampanoag, a resistance fighter, was called by one historian, America’s first Vietnam. People whom the Puritans encountered were regarded as beasts by Puritan leader William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation written in the 1600s. Bradford defined the relationship between the Anglo invaders and the Native American populations, and millions of their descendants have applied this attitude toward the rest of us. Supporters of President Trump even refer to the Harvard-educated Michelle and Barack Obama as apes. At the end of August, 2018, a white candidate for Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, warned voters against voting for his black rival, Andrew Gillum. He said that such a vote would monkey things up, referring to his black opponent as a monkey. In early September, 2018, a Pennsylvania Republican Party secretary called black football players who kneel to protest the killings of unarmed blacks, black baboons. The surname of the Republican woman who called them black baboons is Maloney. Maybe she doesn’t know that in the 19th century, in Harper’s Weekly, the Irish were depicted with simian features. Only in America could a Jew named Stephen Miller be the head of a Neo-Nazi clique in the White House, an Irish American, Steve Bannon, appoint himself the leader of international white nationalism, and Neo-Nazi Italian Americans pass for Nordic. White nationalists are so hard-up for recruits that now Hungarians have been awarded Aryan status.

According to the DeSantises and Maloneys, when modern humans separated from their chimpanzee cousins, blacks didn’t make the leap, but on the other hand when was the last time that a chimpanzee planted a land mine? Which species is more likely to engage in bestial behavior? Robert E. Lee probably agreed with his wife, Mary Custis, Martha Washington’s granddaughter, that blacks were baboons.

Also, like their descendants in the media and politics, the Puritans were prone to conspiracy theories. For them, the ancestors of the Narragansett, and Pequot and Mohegan, led by Satan, fled Europe after the triumph of Christianity. This was the rumor circulated by Sir Walter Raleigh, who is viewed by reference books and biographies as one of the most enlightened men of the 1600s, when he was more like a Rupert Murdoch, rousing the rabble with lies against those seen as the enemies of white people. This included the Indian allies of the Puritans, who were slaughtered at Fort Mystic, Connecticut, because the English couldn’t tell the difference between their allies and their enemies, both of whom were regarded as beasts. As beasts, they deserved to be treated the way that animals should be treated, which explained why Native Americans were incinerated at Fort Mystic, an early act of mass murder against a population considered undesirable and interfering with a settler land grab. The scene was gruesome: dead and dying Indians in the fields surrounding Fort Mystic was so thick in some places that you could hardly pass along,10 which sounds like the scene Knight Jefferson Davis and his Mississippi Rifles left at the Battle of Buena Vista. The Mexican dead and dying were eaten by coyotes. America often expresses its greatness when murdering women and children en masse. The Fort Mystic massacre occurred on May 26, 1637. This massacre was seen by the fanatical fundamentalists as an expression of God’s work. A white god who, in Western paintings is shown with a long white beard.

Then left to his own devices, Captain John Mason ordered his militiamen to set fire to the entire town, burning alive as many as 900 women, children and helpless old men. Those who tried to escape the blaze were cut down with swords and axes. As Plymouth Governor William Bradford later described the scene, paraphrasing Mason’s own exultant account: It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and sent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.11

But no matter how bloody the war waged against the Native Americans by Puritans, it’s the War of Rebellion that still divides the country. While President Trump and millions of Southerners wish to maintain monuments to generals and a president who violated his pledge to defend the Union, those who fought under these men chose to show their devotion to the rebels’ cause by running away from service. By the thousands. Moreover, some of those generals, who fought in a war that led to the murder of 600,000 people, earned their massacre credentials by murdering thousands of blacks, Mexicans and Native Americans. In the rebels’ great propaganda film Gone With The Wind, these rebels are referred to as Knights, whose wickedness has been sanitized by statues, landmarks, names of university buildings, freeways, and more.

It is my opinion that the established chroniclers and tastemakers glide over the facts that would undermine the fiction that America was always great. The effectiveness of this propaganda line to woo a younger generation was demonstrated when Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York opposed the America First idea and was booed by high school students, who have been indoctrinated by teachers whose guide to the War of Rebellion are Gone With The Wind and Birth of a Nation and the follow up to Gone With The Wind, Darry Zanuck’s propaganda piece, the billion dollar fantasy, Hamilton, The Revolution, which promotes the fantasy that Alexander Hamilton and the Schuylar sisters, who profited from slavery, were opposed to slavery, which is like saying that Colgate, which profits from toothpaste sales, is opposed to toothpaste. In Gone With The Wind, wealthy slave holders are depicted as merciful, while slave holders and invaders of Native American lands are shown as abolitionists and friends of Native Americans in Hamilton.

Just as black intellectuals and artists have challenged cinematic and theatrical efforts to whitewash the careers of slaveholders and exterminators of Native Americans, my most recent play, The Haunting of Lin- Manuel Miranda, challenges the $100-million- per-year corporate profit machine called Hamilton, The Revolution. Among the investors for this propaganda piece are those whom Hamilton created the New York bank to benefit. The rich. Hamilton was involved in the slave trade from the time that he was a child, when he received the household slave, Ajax, as a gift for his negotiating slave transfers on behalf of the Schuylers, the slave-holding family that he married into. America’s Hitler, Jefferson Davis, is also enshrined and even praised