Hey y’all, the following piece is part one of a two-part essay that is many years in the making. I wrote the first version of this a couple years ago, and have steadily been re-working it over and over. I hope this feels less like a history lesson and more like an illumination, as it has been for me in its shaping.
As always, I’d be thrilled to hear from you.
With care,
Rachel
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
- James Baldwin
I’ve been pulling at the knot that is America for years. Knots are major trickster energy. The agony of a knot that will not come undone is proving ground for patience. The more you force it, the tighter it gets. I realized a few years ago that despite my best intentions, I’d been tightened into the knot of this nation in ways I didn’t understand. I poured over texts, I bookmarked threads, I didn’t know that all along, I was seeking the heart or the womb or the tomb of this country – all versions of the same thing.
It should not be this difficult to really know America. Indeed it is our birthright, and for this and many reasons, it is a profound violence to ban critical education of this nation’s past. I think at the heart of all Americans, we know that it is the mythology of America that makes America what it is. Which is why the far right fears this so. What would this nation be without its story? And can we know, if we don’t know with piercing clarity what that story is? The layers of delusion are so thick, the propaganda so pervasive, that this country seemingly only exists in the imaginal.
Those who grip most fiercely to the idea that America has already achieved the greatest version of itself, especially those who call for a return to a presumably greater past, are seen as its truest patriots, yet they are furthest from the truth of what this nation really is. They are in the cold, disassociated daydream … whereas America’s greatest critics, past and present, are right in the hot, burning core. They are being cooked in the spiritual fire, and I join them there eagerly. As Rumi says:
“Stay in the spiritual fire.
Let it cook you.
You have been a source of pain.
Now you will be the delight.
You have been an unsafe house.
Now you will be the one
who sees into the Invisible.”
America has been the unsafe house for too long. As America completes its first Plutonian revolution, this evolutionary, alchemical fire is spreading. It is shining its light into all that has long been forced into invisibility, burning off all the smoke, and hopefully transmuting this terror project into delight. As the dewy glow fades and the porcelain veneer chips, America strips down bare and steps humbly in front of the mirror to witness its 246 year old self and all its cruel creations in pursuit of capital at the expense of all else.
But what is America? As I patiently loosen this knot, I find innumerable contradictions that have catalyzed tremendous tragedies of deception, but I also see far more solidarity across difference, far more possibility in that awareness, far more to be hopeful about than to fear. I think, if we really understood this, we might stop fighting each other so ferociously, and find each other more tenderly in the grief of how prolifically we have all been duped by the despotic few who sophisticatedly evolve new tricks to deny us our dignity.
To ask what America is, we must ask what racism and capitalism are, which asks us to trace back to the empire that instigated the global proliferation of both, and we’ll find that global dispossession is the crucial lynchpin of what makes America… and why healing this foundational wound is rising in the collective as a crucial component of liberation.
Imagine it’s some time in the 16-1700’s and you’re a humble land steward in the European countryside – a shepherd tending a flock on wide open pastures, or a farmer growing vegetables in a small patch: sovereign in your labor, happy in the peripheries, held in community. Until suddenly, a royal decree ripples out from the central command of empire, and an aristocrat shows up to your village sanctioned by the state to immediately steal the land that you and your ancestors and their ancestors had only ever known as the commons – no one’s to own, everyone’s to support for collective benefit. In fact, owning the land itself might have seemed like insanity. But it was too late to contemplate. You were in the thick of the Enclosures Movement, and walls, fences, and hedges were springing up all around you, and you, too, were thrust into the possession of the state. You may have joined a wandering mob of insurrectionists demanding justice, fighting for any kind of retribution possible. But regardless, you would be terrorized by prolific state-sponsored violence.
For hundreds of years, rebellious mobs tried in vein to fight the growing empire, yet the battles wore on and empire needed efficiency, needed better tools. The resistance was growing too threatening as it organized. So what to do to wrangle widespread rebellion? Fragment it. Spread it around the world. Turn refugees into mercenaries, forced into indentured servitude to build shipping ports, to clear cut land for agriculture, or to be shipped off to colonies, all cogs in the burgeoning infrastructure of merchant capitalism.
So this is where the seed of America begins to spark into formation, in the upheaval of instantaneous, unexpected fugitivity, and carried within a paradoxical tension. On one side: gluttonous imperialism invents an ingenious technology of manufactured privatization to simultaneously seize land and labor to spread itself with exponential velocity. On the other side, a tidal wave of resistance, rebellion, and revolution burns in the traumatized hearts of people suddenly forced from life and livelihood, once peaceful, now impoverished and dependent upon the state in more sinister ways than before, viewed as strategically disposable to its own greed. Villages burned, community destroyed, everyone thrust into chaos, then re-shuffled into a pristine hierarchy to promote precise control. The knot takes hold. The options narrow.
America sailed across the Atlantic on thousands of ships. In the illuminating book “The Many-Headed Hydra”, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe how these ships are actually better understood as the initiatory laboratories for the social formation that would come to sprout in America, in some ways a perpetuation and tightening of the aforementioned knot. On one side: the culture clash of peoples converging from all over Europe forged cooperation in the confines of close quarters. The authors argue that this effectively birthed a new society that would eventually become the basis for the modern factory. On the other side: authoritarian brutality and intense disciplinarian tactics also fomented the resistance, rebellion, and revolutionary action festering in the spirits of the captives. These dynamics were amplified and evolved with the circulation of both slave and trade ships, sending people and goods from Europe to Virginia to the Caribbean to Africa and back to Europe, the tangled knots get even tighter. (I won’t go into this more now, but the ships and the trades as laboratories for modernity invokes Bayo Akomalafe’s work poignantly – fascinating ideas to explore).
Clear-cutting America for the sake of empire required tremendous labor. Indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa worked side-by-side, and a vast, diverse, dispossessed workforce was born. Then the cycle continues on new soils. Righteous rebellions of the huge masses of globally sourced laborers, as demonstrated by the infamous Bacon Rebellion where (African) slaves and (European) servants united against their masters, became too threatening for the European aristocracy forming the proxy empire in the colonies governing the still-consolidating colonial capitalist world order. Just like in Europe, though now fiercer, wilder, more unruly. And now the stakes were even higher. Free labor was an imperative and inseparable component of delivering massive benefits to capitalism’s investor class.
This many-headed hydra, as Linebaugh and Rediker label them, this rainbow coalition of rebellion were many, and their rulers few. So what to do to wrangle widespread rebellion? Fragment it. If capitalistic greed forced privatization into the mainstream, then a new technology would be needed to take it to its next incarnation. A more dangerous, destructive technology, to shatter through every tender fiber of resistance struggling to take root on new land. Race was invented to protect enterprise, backed not only by the new-world dominion of God called “Capital”, but the old-world dominion of God called “Church” that deemed slavery as God-given. A whole “science of race” was pulled from thin air. Race created a new hierarchy that placed white indentured servants above Black slaves, bolstered by infrastructural apparti such as rewards for compliance and punishment for resistance, such as the invention of “slave patrols”.
“Why do we have police? Have you Googled where they come from? The precinct’s ancestor is the plantation cabin filled with overseers, between the slave quarters and the big house.” - Danez Smith
The raging tributaries of Capitalism and Christianity flooded across the continent, as we know obliterated the millions of Indigenous land stewards by invasively propagating their imperial technology of closing the commons here, too. (The incredible paper “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America” by Greer details this powerfully – happy to send if you’re curious).
So, here’s where it gets particularly interesting, at least to me. Slavery and universal human rights co-evolved. This makes sense logically, but it feels like a revelation to me: the idea that one necessitated the other. In some ways, slavery precipitated the installment of rights that had never existed within empire. As slavery exploded, as subjugation proliferated, the revolutionary spirit to overthrow imperial control was motivated specifically by anti-slavery sentiment. One famous abolitionist figure was Olaudah Equiano, the African anti-slavery campaigner whose efforts helped pass the British Slave Trade Act in 1807, which abolished the slave trade just ten years after he died.
Anti-slavery was understood as anti-empire. Sam Adams, for example, expanded his rhetoric from the “rights of Englishmen” to the more universal “rights of man” during the period leading up to the revolution. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense “was also a treatise on universal rights, equality, and social justice. So there were legitimate tendrils of authentic, liberatory sentiment pulsing within the beating hearts of America’s rebels fighting for people power over crown power.
But America is also heartbreak. The American Revolution itself unified the diverse Europeans and Africans to wage guerrilla warfare for independence, rallied to cooperate by the great promises of universal freedom, by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which also provided the roadmap for the “founding fathers” in their initiatory gestures. Seemingly sincere solidarity was sought. Even the American Constitution was inspired by the model of true democracy found in the Iroquois Confederacy.
But America is also tragedy. The American Revolution co-opted the democratic movement, stole the dream out from under the people who fought for it the hardest. It used this fierce, righteous, diverse coalition to shed the crown, but then it hoarded power for itself. America’s fate has only replicated the empire it hoped to flee, because this people power so fiercely fought for by this rainbow coalition, was ultimately, narrowly secured for one category of individuals: white, Christian, hetero, elite males. This was yet another profound betrayal against the workers building the backbone of society. The promise held in the hearts of countless dispossessed preyed upon by a new class of captors.
Now, without the crown, these European aristocrats could capture all the wealth this land extracted and exploited — too sweet a deal to pass up to egalitarianism and equity. Even Thomas Paine who once fought for universal rights was later terrified of a union of insurgent slaves and Native Americans. Capitalism and racism were entrenched. Anti-slavery helped America throw off the mantle of empire, but its new elitist, privileged class turned that against its greatest defenders, orchestrating an even more horrific delusion to found a nation. They split the very proletariat that fought for its independence into factions along lines of race, sex, and class. New-world empire accelerated capitalist accumulation to fuel this hungry, haunted, hollowed-out capitalist, white supremacist world order hiding beneath the name of “Democracy”. Back to Linebaugh and Rediker, this is the moment the hydra was decapitated by Hercules to spread the colonial capitalist terror project by draining America of its promise, of its people and its ideas that threatened mighty Herculean reign.
I’ll continue with part two next week to knit this all together. Thank you in advance for your generous time with this.
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Is America possible? (part 1)