As I write the U.S. Presidential election is just a few weeks away. Monday October 12th was a federal holiday, Columbus Day, celebrating the famous Italian’s “discovery” of America (with the sponsorship of the most Catholic King and Queen of Spain) in 1492. While white Americans celebrate Christopher Columbus’ navigational achievements, native Americans rail against the ensuing genocide against indigenous populations . Fair enough.
This past weekend a statue in Portland, Oregon of our most beloved President Abraham Lincoln, who is celebrated for maintaining the union, the United States of America, (at times by dictatorial fiat) and for “freeing the slaves” (however reluctantly), was toppled. Some of our national leaders have declaimed this disparagement of our 16th President as an unforgivable affront to the United States of America, tearing at the fabric of our democratic union. I take a more nuanced view. Toppling of the Lincoln statue was intended to remind us that even during the U.S. civil war our government was still subjugating the indigenous people of the western territories and that in 1862 Lincoln himself ordered the execution of 38 Sioux Nation warriors who had participated in an “uprising” against white settlers unlawfully occupying their land. Of course, Lincoln’s order was actually a show of mercy to the 252 Sioux whose sentences he commuted, but still…
Portland, Oregon has been the scene of nightly protests since the killing of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman 142 days ago. President Trump has repeatedly cited the Portland protests to justify his plan to federalize the law enforcement response, in his words “to bring law and order” back to Portland. However one may feel about those Black Lives Matter protests, the toppling of President Lincoln’s statue by proponents of replacing Columbus Day with a new national holiday honoring America’s indigenous peoples should be viewed as a limited and restrained protest against the United States’ history of killing and displacing North America’s indigenous peoples.
Meanwhile, nightly protests continue in Portland, Oregon. The actions of most protesters (putting aside a few unacceptable instances of violence and property destruction) should not be viewed as existential threats to the “American way of life”. A message posted on a Northeast Portland church sign clearly expresses the frustration of the black community with President Trump:
Which is to say, in coronovirus terms, slaveholders want the freedom to infect.
This is a reference to President Trump’s and his supporters’ resistance to wearing face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic and the disproportionate effect that the virus has had on the relatively poorer black community. The statement equates Trump and his conservative, mostly white and mostly wealthy supporters with the slaveholders of past centuries. This is an intentionally hyperbolic extrapolation of the black community’s complaint that the economic and political hegemony of the relatively wealthy, white community continues to subjugate the black community. I don’t endorse or accept the church sign’s literal message, but by provocation at least it reminds me that the black community in general has a valid gripe against the status quo. Against the attitude that “That’s just the way it is.” Which is why I, like Portland’s “liberal” leadership, continue to condone the nightly BLM protests.
