I hate the word "Genocide". It is a horrible concept. It is a far more horrible reality. And if white law enforcement killings of blacks who are no threat to anybody has not quite reached some technical threshold, there is no doubt that that is exactly where those acts of domestic terrorism are headed. The overall pattern is clear.
Why is it important to use the correct word? Words have power. If you can name something, you begin to have the power to change that thing. If you fear to name something, you increase the power that the thing you fear has over you.
I learned this from the woman's movement in the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, the woman's movement was a pale weak shadow of a lot of other parts of the civil rights movement in my eyes. As a group compared to other groups, feminists and activists for women's rights were cowards. We asked more often than we demanded. We asked permission instead of asserting our rights. We were not loud and proud, we were quiet and mannerly and asked permission.
But the woman's movement also got some things very right. And one of the things that it got right, to my surprise, was the importance of naming things, and the importance of telling our story accurately, even when the reality was crude and ugly. Telling our story accurately even when the truth is ugly is important for many reasons. One of the main reasons that it is important to tell the story accurately when the truth is cruel and ugly is that if we use polite language to sugar coat our reality is that it leaves out the whole point of telling our story.
The point of telling our story is to show the world that the reality we are facing is unacceptably cruel and ugly. If we do not tell just how cruel, and just how ugly, then it looks like we are making a big fuss about nothing. If we talk about genocide and torture, and know the definitions and the laws and norms and treaties that are being violated, and the details of what was done by whom to whom, then it is no longer a big fuss about nothing.
Thank you to Kos for this platform, and to so many diarists who take the time to write well researched, clear, powerful diaries here. Telling the whole truth matters, and here we can learn so much of what is hidden elsewhere.
Sometimes calling a spade a spade and a rake a rake and a mattock a mattock and a pickax a pickax becomes necessary.
Logic and reason is an extremely important part of any argument.
But in some arguments, acknowledging what it is like to live with my reality is also an important part of my reality.
I am a white well educated middle class female who grew up with decent caring parents who cared about fighting against racism, even at a certain amount of risk to themselves. But it was not until the past year when I started spending a large amount of time reading the diaries here that I finally began to get a visceral, in the pit of my stomach, feel for what it means to be a black living in the United States even today.
I have studied International (Public) Law, Comparative Law, and International Human Rights Law in law school, although I am not a lawyer. I have done additional readings on genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Germany, and other places. And I will agree that the current level of genocide against African Americans and Native Americans is not anywhere near as effective as the worst genocides we have currently seen around the world and seen in the past in this country.
But I do not use the word lightly and I am trying carefully not to weaken the word. What I am trying to do is to encourage people to take a look at whether what we are dealing with in this country is racism, or whether it goes beyond racism, to a deliberate attempt to make life in this country unlivable for blacks and Native Americans. I believe that we are once again living with what Martin Luther King Jr tried to stop, the systematic, life threatening, daily, inescapable terrorism (again not using that word lightly) against blacks, Hispanics in some areas, and Native Americans. I contend that since Obama became President, the backlash from that, added to the growing anti-minority hatred over the last 70 years since the beginning of this country's civil rights movement's success with Brown v. Board of Education, while it has transformed the face of terrorism against blacks and others, it has not eliminated the terrorism or even significantly diminished it except for short periods of time or in isolated areas. I think we are fooling ourselves. It is no longer publicly acceptable to invite the whole town to a lynching and take pictures and send postcards showing your wife and children enjoying the spectacle with you. But that does not mean that if you are an uppity black you are not going to be lynched.
I will address this subject more over time, with more references and details. What we are dealing with, today, in this country, across this nation, is more than just racism. And we need a stronger word to describe the reality of the problem, because if we cannot name it, we cannot fix it.
I am willing to accept that there may be an even more accurate word to describe what is happening than genocide. I welcome suggestions for other words. But, as Helen Reddy sang about women's struggles in "I am Woman!", "I know too much to go back to pretend!"
We need a word that will describe the domestic terrorism against blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities in this country. Racism is too weak, and has been weakened further by being stretched to cover minor failures to be completely understanding of the problems minorities face.
Until I have a better word, if there is one, to describe the effects of terrorism, murder, rape, incarceration, systemic violence and other abuses of blacks and similar minorities, I am calling it genocide because that is what it looks like, sounds like, and smells like to me.
Thank you, a2nite for your comments on this diary, and your other contributions to my re-education on anti-black terrorism in America. What you shared says it better than I can, but I will continue to try to get the depths of depravity in American race relations more widely understood and acknowledged.