Some of the faces at the Woolworth's lunch-counter sit-in,
May 28, 1963, Jackson, Miss.
[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]
It's one of the great historic puzzles: How was it that poor Southern whites, who had the most to lose by seceding from the Union and declaring war against the North, came to agree to do such a thing?
The question survives today: How is that the white Southern working class, which has been rendered economically bereft by its deep embrace of conservatism, its rejection of unionism, and the cultural backwardness of which its citizens are aggressively proud, can continue to support a politics that makes their lives miserable?
Lyndon Baines Johnson knew the answer to that, according to Bill Moyers, who recalls that LBJ told him, in 1960: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best
colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him
somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Indeed, the pattern for this was established at the very genesis of the Confederacy, when Southern society remained highly stratified -- an elite "1 percent" society of plantation owners and slaveholders, a large white working underclass, and the black slave class, all walled off from the other. The Confederacy was the brainchild of the elite plantation/slave owners, who were determined to maintain their privileged status quo; but its monstrous offspring, the Civil War, would be fed by the bodies and lives of millions of working-class Southerners who received only a handful of direct benefits from the institution of slavery, few of them economic.
The critical question that gave the Confederacy its limited legitimacy was the extent to which the latter were willing to lay down their lives for the former. And how was that made possible?
Jonna Ivin at the journal Stir expounded on this at length recently, while pondering the nature of Donald Trump voters:
As slavery expanded in the South and indentured servitude declined,
the wealthy elite offered poor whites the earliest version of the
American Dream: if they worked hard enough, they could achieve
prosperity, success, and upward social mobility — if not for themselves,
then perhaps for future generations.
But few realized that dream. In “The Whiting of Euro-Americans: A Divide and Conquer Strategy,” the Rev. Dr. Thandeka notes:
Not
surprisingly, however, poor whites never became the economic equals of
the elite. Though both groups’ economic status rose, the gap between the
wealthy and poor widened as a result of slave productivity. Thus, poor
whites’ belief that they now shared status and dignity with their social
betters was largely illusory.
With whites and Blacks divided, the wealthy elite prospered
enormously for the next two hundred years while poor whites remained
locked in poverty. With the potential election of Abraham Lincoln,
however, the upper class began to worry they would lose their most
valuable commodity: slave labor. The numbers were not on their
side — not the financial numbers, but the number of bodies it would take
to wage war should Lincoln try to abolish slavery. And it was white
male bodies they needed. (Poor women were of little value to the rich,
since they couldn’t vote or fight in a war.) So how did wealthy
plantation owners convince poor white males to fight for a “peculiar
institution” that did not benefit them?
The answer, as Ivin explains, is actually fairly simple: "Religious and political leaders began using a combination of fear, sex,
and God to paint a chilling picture of freed angry Black men ravaging
the South."
As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming
more strident in defending slavery. The institution was not just a
necessary evil: it was a positive good, a practical and moral
necessity. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for
all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Curfews governed the
movement of slaves at night, and vigilante committees patrolled the
roads, dispensing summary justice to wayward slaves and whites suspected
of harboring abolitionist views. Laws were passed against the
dissemination of abolitionist literature, and the South increasingly
resembled a police state. A prominent Charleston lawyer described the
city’s citizens as living under a “reign of terror.”
The primary, and perhaps most important, of the institutions in which working-class whites were propagandized into supporting the cause of the slaveholders was in the churches, where preachers constantly extolled the virtues of slavery and the dangers of a society without it:
Rev. Richard Furman
Reverend Richard Furman of South Carolina insisted that the right to hold
slaves was clearly sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures. He emphasized a
practical side as well, warning that if Lincoln were elected, “every
Negro in South Carolina and every other Southern state will be his own
master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you. If
you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to
consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”
A fellow reverend from Virginia agreed that on no other subject “are
[the Bible’s] instructions more explicit, or their salutary tendency and
influence more thoroughly tested and corroborated by experience than on
the subject of slavery.” The Methodist Episcopal Church, South,
asserted that slavery “has received the sanction of Jehova.” As a South
Carolina Presbyterian concluded: “If the scriptures do not justify
slavery, I know not what they do justify.”
The Biblical argument started with Noah’s curse on Ham, the father of
Canaan, which was used to demonstrate that God had ordained slavery and
had expressly applied it to Blacks. Commonly cited were passages in
Leviticus that authorized the buying, selling, holding and bequeathing
of slaves as property. Methodist Samuel Dunwody from South Carolina
documented that Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and Job owned slaves, arguing
that “some of the most eminent of the Old Testament saints were slave
holders.” The Methodist Quarterly Review noted further that “the
teachings of the new testament in regard to bodily servitude accord with
the old.” While slavery was not expressly sanctioned in the New
Testament, Southern clergymen argued that the absence of condemnation
signified approval. They cited Paul’s return of a runaway slave to his
master as Biblical authority for the Fugitive Slave Act, which required
the return of runaway slaves.
... During the 1850’s, pro-slavery arguments from the pulpit became
especially strident. A preacher in Richmond exalted slavery as “the
most blessed and beautiful form of social government known; the only one
that solves the problem, how rich and poor may dwell together; a
beneficent patriarchate.” The Central Presbyterian affirmed that
slavery was “a relation essential to the existence of civilized
society.” By 1860, Southern preachers felt comfortable advising their
parishioners that “both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both
are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of
time.”
Of course, Southern politicians got into the act, making defense of slavery both a patriotic and a cultural value:
William Harris, Mississippi’s commissioner to Georgia, explained that
Lincoln’s election had made the North more defiant than ever. “They
have demanded, and now demand equality between the white and negro
races, under our constitution; equality in representation, equality in
right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office,
equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony,” he
cautioned, adding that the new administration wanted “freedom to the
slave, but eternal degradation for you and me.”
As Harris saw things, “Our fathers made this a government for the
white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race,
incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be
associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social
equality.” Lincoln and his followers, he stated, aimed to “overturn and
strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its
stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white
races.” For Harris, the choice was clear. Mississippi would “rather
see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one
common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of
civil, political and social equality with the negro race.” The Georgia
legislature ordered the printing of a thousand copies of his speech.
Typical of the commissioner letters is that written by Stephen Hale,
an Alabama commissioner, to the Governor of Kentucky, in December 1860.
Lincoln’s election, he observed, was “nothing less than an open
declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government
destroys the property of the south, lays waste her fields, and
inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection,
consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to
pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized
Africans. The slave holder and non-slaveholder must ultimately share
the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free
negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in
all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war
of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the
resources of the country.”
The black rape scene from 'The Birth of a Nation'
What Southerner, Hale asked, “can without indignation and horror
contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and
daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon
terms of political and social equality?” Abolition would surely mean
that “the two races would be continually pressing together,” and
“amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be
inevitable.” Secession, argued Hale, was the only means by which the
“heaven ordained superiority of the white over the black race” could be
sustained. The abolition of slavery would either plunge the South into a
race war or so stain the blood of the white race that it would be
contaminated for all time.” Could southern men “submit to such
degradation and ruin,” he asked, and responded to his own question, “God
forbid that they should.”
Henry Benning
Typical also was the message from Henry Benning of Georgia – later
one of General Lee’s most talented brigade commanders – to the Virginia
legislature. “If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain
that slavery is to be abolished,” he predicted. “By the time the north
shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large
majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures,
black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white
race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case.”
What did Benning predict would happen? “War will break out
everywhere like hidden fire from the earth. We will be overpowered and
our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth,
and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate
in imagination. We will be completely exterminated,” he announced, “and
the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will
go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or Saint Domingo.”
Finally, of course, community leaders fell into line in promoting this line of thought:
More to the point, he noted, abolition meant “the turning loose upon
society, without the salutary restraints to which they are now
accustomed, more than four millions of a very poor and ignorant
population, to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants
should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the
bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” The planter and his family would
“not only to be reduced to poverty and want, by the robbery of his
property, but to complete the refinement of the indignity, they are to
be degraded to the level of an inferior race, be jostled by them in
their paths, and intruded upon, and insulted over by rude and vulgar
upstarts. Who can describe the loathsomeness of such an intercourse;—the
constrained intercourse between refinement reduced to poverty, and
swaggering vulgarity suddenly elevated to a position which it is not
prepared for?”
Non-slaveholders, he predicted, were also in danger. “It will be to
the non-slaveholder, equally with the largest slaveholder, the
obliteration of caste and the deprivation of important privileges,” he
cautioned. “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of
nobility in his relations as to the negro,” he reminded his readers.
“In the Southern slaveholding States, where menial and degrading offices
are turned over to be per formed exclusively by the Negro slave, the
status and color of the black race becomes the badge of inferiority, and
the poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his
brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. He may be
poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud
and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he
would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the
Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negroes to an
equality with himself and his family.”
Wealthy plantation owners had succeeded in separating the two races,
and they now planted a fear of Blacks in the minds of poor and working
white men. Enslaved Blacks were an asset to the wealthy, but freed
Blacks were portrayed as a danger to all. By creating this common enemy
among rich and poor alike, the wealthy elite sent a clear message: fight
with us against abolitionists and you will remain safe.
It worked. Poor and working class whites signed up by the hundreds of
thousands to fight for what they believed was their way of life.
Meanwhile, many of the wealthy planters who benefitted economically from
slavery were granted exemptions from military service and avoided the
horrors of battle. On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, wealthy elites
were allowed to pay other men to take their place on the bloody
battlefields. As the war lingered on, poor whites in the North and South
began to realize the rich had waged the war, but it was the poor who
were dying in it.
... With more than 650,000 deaths, the end of the Civil War eventually
brought freedom for African-Americans. But after the war, ex-slaves were
left to linger and die in a world created by those in the North who no
longer cared and those in the South who now resented their existence.
Poor whites didn’t fare much better. Without land, property, or hope for
economic gains, many freed Blacks and returning white soldiers turned
to sharecropping and found themselves once again working side by side,
dependent on wealthy landowners.
Ivin also makes clear that this has profound relevance today, because these same poor whites are the meat of Donald Trump's proto-fascist army:
Trump supporters believe he’s different. They believe that he cares
about us, that he tells it like it is, that he gives us a voice, that he
can’t be bought because he’s already rich, that he’s railing against
politics as usual.
But does Trump care about the white underclass, or does he still think poor people are “morons”?
Did slave owners care about white indentured servants when they
pitted them against African slaves, or did they want to ensure a steady
supply of cheap labor? Did Ronald Reagan care about poor white people
when he trotted out the fictional welfare queen, or did he need a budget
item to cut? Do wealthy elites and politicians care about poor and
middle class people when they send them off to war, or are they
anticipating massive profits?
Trump is railing against establishment politics not because he cares
about the white underclass, but because he needs us — for now. He isn’t
reaching out a hand to lift us up. He wants to stand on our shoulders so
we can lift him up.
“Slavery as it existed in the South … was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. … Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of food, clothes and good medical care.”
-- Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins, Southern Slavery, As It Was
“Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. Where in the world are the Negroes better off today than in America?”
— Jack Kershaw, League of the South board member, 1998
[Slavery was “a bad institution”, but possibly] “the mildest, most humane form of slavery ever practiced”.
“If you look at the wealth created by the slaves, in food, clothing,
shelter, medical care, care before you’re old enough to work, care until
you died, they got 90% of the wealth that they generated. I
don’t get that. The damn government takes my money to the tune of 50%.”
-- Todd Kiscaden, 64, a neo-Confederate guarding the grave of Confederate Gen. Edmund Pettus
"I want to tell you one more thing I
know about the Negro. When I go through Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and I would see these little government houses, and in front of that
government house the door was usually open and the older people and the
kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the
porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for
their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
"And
because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they
do? They abort their young children, they put their young
men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve
often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having
a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government
subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
-- Cliven Bundy
While many defenders of the Confederacy are content to simply argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about [insert historically inaccurate excuse here, i.e., "states rights," "foreign trade," "federal tyranny"], others try a different tack: Hey, slavery really wasn't so bad in reality -- thus, neo-Confederates Douglas Wilson's and Steve Wilkins' obscene attempt to make it out to be a benevolent institution. Wilson's and Wilkins' book Southern Slavery, As it Was is inordinately popular on the far right, especially among the home-schooling crowd.
As the SPLC explains, the book "selectively interprets slave narratives and rehashes pro-slavery
arguments of the mid-nineteenth century to argue that the practice was
benign, sanctioned by God and was used as a 'pretext' by Unionists to
prosecute a war fought over the 'biblical meaning of constitutional
government' in an effort to suppress Christianity."
Many others try to soft-pedal the memory of what slavery was about, even beyond the morally bankrupt concept of owning another human being. Slaves were well provided for, they say. And they love, as Bundy rather infamously did in 2014 in Nevada before a bunch of reporters, to suggest that their current impoverished state is actually worse than slavery.
All of which adds up to the obfuscation of the realities of slavery, and what it actually meant -- and why its devastating and toxic legacy remains with us today.
The reality is not hard to find. From Geoffrey Ward's The Civil War: An Illustrated History:
A slave enters the world in a one-room dirt-covered shack. Drafty in winter, reeking in summer, slave cabins bred pneumonia, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis. The child who survived to be sent to the fields at twelve was likely to have rotten teeth, worms, dysentery, malaria. Fewer than four out of one hundred slaves lived to be sixty.
"It is expected," a planter wrote, "that [slaves] should rise early enough to be at work by the time it is light ... While at work, they should be brisk ... I have no objection to their whistling or singing some lively tune, but no drawling tunes are allowed ... for their motions are almost certain to keep time with the music." Slaves worked till dark, unless there was a full moon that permitted them to be kept at it still longer.
On the auction block, blacks were made to jump and dance to demonstrate their sprightliness and good cheer, were often stripped to show how strong they were, how little whipping they needed. "The customers would feel our bodies," an ex-slave recalled, "and make us show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse." Since slave marriages had no legal status, preachers changed the wedding vows to read, "Until death or distance do you part."
"We were not more than dogs," a slave woman recalled. "If they caught us with a piece of paper in our pockets, they'd whip us. They was afraid we'd learn to read and write, but I never got the chance."
And their mistreatment, as the Wikipedia entry on the subject suggests, went well beyond what one might imagine necessary for the subjection of millions of people, and grew well into the irrationally sadistic:
Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling, hanging, beating, burning, mutilation, branding and imprisonment. Punishment was often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but sometimes abuse was performed to re-assert the dominance of the master (or overseer) over the slave.
They were punished with knives, guns, field tools and nearby objects. The whip was the most common instrument used against a slave; one said "The only punishment that I ever heard or knew of being administered slaves was whipping", although he knew several who were beaten to death for offenses such as "sassing" a white person, hitting another "negro", "fussing" or fighting in quarters.
Slaves who worked and lived on plantations were the most frequently punished. Punishment could be administered by the plantation owner or master, his wife, children (white males) or (most often) the overseer or driver.
Slave overseers were authorized to whip and punish slaves. One overseer told a visitor, "Some Negroes are determined never to let a white man whip them and will resist you, when you attempt it; of course you must kill them in that case." A former slave describes witnessing females being whipped: "They usually screamed and prayed, though a few never made a sound." If the woman was pregnant, workers might dig a hole for her to rest her belly while being whipped. After slaves were whipped, overseers might order their wounds be burst and rubbed with turpentine and red pepper. An overseer reportly took a brick, ground it into a powder, mixed it with lard and rubbed it all over a slave.
A metal collar was put on a slave to remind him of his wrongdoing. Such collars were thick and heavy; they often had protruding spikes which made fieldwork difficult and prevented the slave from sleeping when lying down. Louis Cain, a former slave, describes seeing another slave punished: "One nigger run to the woods to be a jungle nigger, but massa cotched him with the dog and took a hot iron and brands him. Then he put a bell on him, in a wooden frame what slip over the shoulders and under the arms. He made that nigger wear the bell a year and took it off on Christmas for a present to him. It sho' did make a good nigger out of him."
Slaves were punished for a number of reasons: working too slowly, breaking a law (for example, running away), leaving the plantation without permission or insubordination. Myers and Massy describe the practices: "The punishment of deviant slaves was decentralized, based on plantations, and crafted so as not to impede their value as laborers." Whites punished slaves publicly to set an example. A man named Harding describes an incident in which a woman assisted several men in a minor rebellion: "The women he hoisted up by the thumbs, whipp'd and slashed her with knives before the other slaves till she died." Men and women were sometimes punished differently; according to the 1789 report of the Virginia Committee of the Privy Council, males were often shackled but women and girls were left free.
The branding of slaves for identification was common during the colonial era; however, by the nineteenth century it was used primarily as punishment. Mutilation (such as castration, or amputating ears) was a relatively common punishment during the colonial era and still used in 1830. Any punishment was permitted for runaway slaves, and many bore wounds from shotgun blasts or dog bites used by their captors.
Even 150 years after it was finally overthrown, the legacy of this evil remains with us today. The underlying attitudes that gave it sustenance, it emerges, remain very much alive today; anti-black attitudes remain at toxically high levels in the former Confederate states. Its legacy also lingers in our racially segregated ghettoes. It continues to have a horribly negative pull on the mental health of African Americans.
And of course, white folks remain defiantly obtuse about its legacy. One of their favorite claims -- which we'll be exploring in greater depth throughout Confederate Heritage Month -- is that blacks have proven they are less capable because slavery was outlawed 150 years ago and they still haven't improved their lot significantly, as though the subsequent systems of oppression put in place, particularly Jim Crow and other means of demographic segregation, had no effect on their ability to advance.
But even without those systems, as Daria Rothmayr demonstrates authoritatively in her book Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage,blacks' disadvantaged position would remain. She describes, using the economic "lock-in" model, the way that unfair competitive advantage
can begin to reproduce itself over time, automatically, without any
ongoing illegal behavior.
It actually takes conscious choices on the part of whites, who are too busy being defensive about the legacy of slavery to take those steps. Mostly, they swim in the system every day and are unaware how slavery continues to impact American society today. As Luke Visconti puts it:
If you go back to people being created equally, it is just math that a
percentage of our country’s greatest minds were eliminated from the
competition simply by fact of skin color, and by extension their
families were denied the head-start of their accomplishments. Every
white person benefits from this–even people who arrived to the United
States yesterday.
If you watch much cable-network teevee, it’s a statistical
near-certainty you’ve seen this ad sometime in the past week, because
SeaWorld has been flooding the cables with it. Here’s the script:
Some say, free the whales. For them, nothing else is
acceptable. But nothing could be worse for the whales. Most of the orcas
at SeaWorld were born here. Sending them into the wild wouldn’t be
noble. It could be fatal.
When they freed Keiko, the killer whale of movie fame, the effort was
a failure, and he perished. But we also understand that times have
changed.
Today, people are concerned about the world’s largest animals like
never before. So [sounding slightly annoyed], we too must change.
That’s why the orcas in our care will be the last generation at
SeaWorld. There will be no more breeding. We’re also phasing out orca
theatrical shows. They’ll continue to receive the highest standard of
care available anywhere. And guests can come to see them simply being
their majestic selves – inspiring the next generation of people to love
them as you do.
Fortunately, I resisted the impulse to hurl my pizza at the screen
when watching this for the eighth time. Not sure what would have
happened on the ninth had it still been within reach.
Indeed, you know that it had to have had the folks at Humane Society
of the U.S. – SeaWorld’s allies in their new, more “sensitive” approach
to handling their captive orcas, the great upshot of which is that
SeaWorld will indeed cease breeding its captive stock – had to have been
reaching for their heartburn medications, not to mention their
Rolodexes, upon seeing this ad.
Already, HSUS has been under a lot of
internal fire within the animal-rights community for having aligned
itself with SeaWorld in this effort to help the company reform its image
– Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd was unsparing, calling HSUS chief Wayne
Pacelle SeaWorld’s “Judas.”
Now it looked as if the SeaWorld public-relations team was
intentionally lobbing uncooked eggs onto Pacelle’s face. Stinky, lying
eggs.
First of all, let’s be clear: Not a single animal-rights organization
involved in the orca-captivity issue advocates simply “freeing the
whales.” What all of these organizations, and certainly HSUS, advocate
is a combined program that works to reintroduce wild-born orcas (there
are six of them in SeaWorld’s inventory) back into large seapens in
their native waters, and to place captive-born orcas in whale “sanctuaries” that give the whales room to roam and explore a complex natural environment while still providing them with human care.
Reducing this thoughtful and scientifically sound concept to a mere
caricature of “free the whales” is, however, typical of SeaWorld’s
response in all of its dealings with animal-rights activists – namely,
to make them out to be a bunch of “extremists” and “radicals.”
And throwing the Keiko story out there as a “failure” was a
particular slap in the face to the HSUS, since they had been in charge
of the orca when he died in 2003.
Certainly, there was a rueful quality to Pacelle’s post at the HSUS blog
defending his organization’s record in its handling of Keiko, not to
mention the concept of seapens as rehabilitation facilities for captive
orcas.
I understand the impulse among so many advocates to call
upon SeaWorld to remove orcas from their enclosures and allow them to
live in sea pens. I’ve long talked about that idea, too. We have quite a
history with that issue, given that the HSUS was centrally involved in
the Keiko project more than 15 years ago and put a million dollars into
his release into sea pens and eventually into the wild. Keiko lived in
those environments for five years. In terms of improving his individual
welfare, I believe the project was a success. Many others, especially
the folks at SeaWorld and others from the zoo and aquarium worlds,
consider it a failure because Keiko never achieved full independence.
But I think everyone – on both sides of this divide — agrees it’s an
issue that comes with tremendous challenges and costs and risks and
warrants more careful study. It’s probably further complicated by the
biographies of the whales at SeaWorld, since all but four of the nearly
30 whales are captive-born, and the few that were wild-born have been in
captivity for decades.
This is being kind, and then some. The reality is that Keiko had been
doomed by an intransigent and ultimately uncaring marine-park industry
to essentially rot to death in his pool in Mexico City, because they
feared the papilloma virus he had contracted there might spread to their
collections. It was the intervention of animal-rights activists that
rescued him, quite successfully, and gained him seven more years of good
life, superior to anything experienced by any other captive orcas.
If the marine-park industry had had its way, Keiko never
would have been moved out of Reino Aventura and almost certainly would
have died there by 1996, perhaps 1997 at the latest. Period.
Keiko in Oregon, 1996
If you go back to 1994 and '95, when the "Free Keiko" campaign was
just getting underway, it had been made painfully clear by the entire
marine-park industry that Keiko was not going to be leaving Reino
Aventura, the tiny, cramped Mexico City pool where he had been held
since 1985, anytime soon. None of the other parks wanted him because of
his papilloma-virus infection and his rapidly declining health. And they
actively sabotaged an agreement between activists and Reino Aventura to
place him in a seapen in Iceland.
Instead, the campaign successfully built a new pool for him in
Oregon, bought him from Reino Aventura, and moved him there in January
1996. He was moved a little more than a year after that to the Iceland
seapen.
And he wound up living a good life up until late 2003. So the
campaign to free Keiko bought him more than seven more years of life.
And they were pretty damned good years, especially for a large male
captive orca whose previous life had mainly been stuck inside tiny
concrete pools. His pool in Oregon was the nicest orca pool in the
world, and he regained his health there, losing the papiloma virus and
gaining large amounts of weight. His Icelandic seapen was even better;
he grew healthy and strong there, and relearned how to hunt on his own
quite efficiently.
Keiko was functionally free beginning in the summer of 1999, allowed
to roam at will out of his seapen, but returning voluntarily until that
day in August 2002 when he hooked up with a pod of wild orcas and never
came back, showing up in Norway instead and reestablishing contact with
humans.
The Keiko experiment was not a failure except in reaching a final
goal that the industry had a direct hand in ensuring was never reached
-- namely, a positive identification of his familial pod so he could be
reunited with them. What we learned from Keiko is that such
identification is vital to a complete reintegration.
But in every other regard, this was a successful reintroduction to
the wild. He learned to feed himself. He was independent. He clearly
appeared to be healthy and happy, right up until just before he died.
And the lung infection he died from may well have been contracted in
captivity anyway.
Here’s what Paul Spong, the great orca scientist, had to say about the Keiko saga:
“My belief is that Keiko would have needed direct contact
with members of his immediate family and community in order to fully
integrate back into a life in the wild. That did not happen in Iceland,
and it is very unlikely that it would have happened in Norway. However,
this does not mean that it could not happen, given the appropriate
circumstances. Had more been known about Keiko’s social background, it
would have been far easier to put him in contact with members of his
family. I do not believe he met his mother or any siblings or close
cousins while he was swimming freely in Icelandic waters. He did meet
and interact with other orcas, but they were not his kin, so he did not
join them permanently. That said, Keiko did get to experience the feel
and sounds of the ocean once again, after being surrounded by barren
concrete walls for most of his life, and that, I believe, must have come
as a profound relief to him. For me, the simple fact that Keiko died as
a free whale spells success for the grand project that brought him
home. Deniers will deny, spinners will spin, but they cannot erase or
alter this truth.”
And one more note: During the seven years (1996-2003) that Keiko was
enjoying the good life in Oregon and Iceland and Norway, under the care
of animal activists, a total of six orcas died at SeaWorld. If SeaWorld
and its minions want to imply that the kind of care that Keiko received
“killed him,” that’s an accusation that can be hurled straight back at
them sixfold.
One can understand the HSUS feeling the need to troop along, despite
this obvious public-relations slap in the face from SeaWorld, in
maintaining the alliance to help make the captive orcas’ lives better.
That no doubt is why Pacelle defends SeaWorld in spite of the
churlishness:
While The HSUS is committed to looking at the options
that exist for captive animals, I want to encourage animal advocates to
celebrate the major progress that SeaWorld has made, as we’ve done, and
to inspire the company to take additional positive action across a broad
swath of animal protection concerns. What the company has committed to
is quite extraordinary, and I urge every advocate to take stock of the
unprecedented set of pledges SeaWorld has made – many of them
unimaginable even among the core group of advocates and organizations
who have been demanding reform for so long.
That makes a certain amount of sense, but nonetheless, no one will be
blamed if they continue to be skeptical that SeaWorld will ever really
“get” why orcas don’t belong in captivity. Because they obviously don’t
now. They’re just finally facing up to the realities of their bottom
line, and their remaining cultural impulse is to keep sniping at their
critics rather than ever acknowledging those critics were right all
along.
What’s also obvious is that Joel Manby has a long row to hoe when it
comes to changing the culture within SeaWorld to one that actually
understands the bigger picture, and genuinely places the welfare of the
whales above their own predilections and bottom lines. The ghost of Fred
Jacobs clearly still haunts their public-relations department, so that
might be a good place to start making some cultural changes too.
In the meantime, we’ll all be forgiven if we continue to watch
SeaWorld make these changes with nothing but deep skepticism. This response ad from PETA pretty much says it all.
It is one of the oldest, hoariest, and most reliable tropes wielded by defenders of the Confederacy: the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about "states rights." That's what they actually used to teach us in high school as part of our standard education.
It is a lie. All anyone has to do is go back and survey the original declarations of secession by the various Southern states -- as well as the many speeches on behalf of secession by various Confederacy advocates -- to get a clear understanding of what motivated them.
It was slavery. And white supremacy. And very little else.
The only mention, or discussion, of "states rights" in all of this is actually pointed the other direction: The Confederates were in fact agitated extremely by Northern states who were asserting their states rights by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all non-slave-holding states to return any and all former (usually escaped) slaves who were living within their borders. The fact that the federal government did so little to enforce the act was, in the view of the Confederates, proof positive that the entire federal compact was irrevocably broken.
Here. You'll get a better idea of all this if you scroll through the complete collection of the various Declarations of Secession by the Confederate states.
Mississippi:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--
the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the
product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions
of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate
verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none
but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These
products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a
blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the
institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There
was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a
dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work
out our ruin. ....
... It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in
the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged
their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst. ...
Georgia:
The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with
the Government of the United States of America, present to their
confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation.
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of
complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with
reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to
weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and
persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional
obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their
power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal
enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy
of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of
aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our
people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years
past in the condition of virtual civil war. ...
While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the
African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that
slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding
States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as
now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct
reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in
the United States for more than half a century after the Government
went into operation. The main reason was that the North, even if united,
could not control both branches of the Legislature during any portion
of that time. Therefore such an organization must have resulted either
in utter failure or in the total overthrow of the Government. The
material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal
Government; that of the South not at all. ...
... Why? Because by their declared principles and policy they have outlawed
$3,000,000,000 of our property in the common territories of the Union;
put it under the ban of the Republic in the States where it exists and
out of the protection of Federal law everywhere; because they give
sanctuary to thieves and incendiaries who assail it to the whole extent
of their power, in spite of their most solemn obligations and covenants;
because their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us
not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves,
our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our
altars, and our firesides....
A depiction of South Carolina's secession convention
South Carolina:
... The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free
persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to
represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of
their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years;
and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted
have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive
of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have
assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic
institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in
fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have
denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open
establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to
disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other
States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to
leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by
emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
A banner from South Carolina secessionists.
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing,
until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government.
Observing the *forms* [emphasis in the original] of the Constitution, a
sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive
Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A
geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States
north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high
office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes
are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of
the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government
cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public
mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate
extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution,
has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship,
persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming
citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy,
hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the
Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the
common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional,
and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease
throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the
equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no
longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the
Federal Government will have become their enemy. ...
Texas:
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various
States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by
the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African
race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully
held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that
condition only could their existence in this country be rendered
beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to
be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the
original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these
States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly
authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed
will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations;
while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races,
as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities
upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.
By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the
certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no
alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or
unite her destinies with the South.
Virginia:
The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the
United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the
twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven
hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under
the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States,
and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their
injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said
powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.
Alabama:
Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading
friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted.
Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republican party, the
election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of
Administration, but as the inauguration of new principles, and a new
theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it
is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a
solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern
people, of hostility to the South, her property and her
institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the
triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the
South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San
Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations,
and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the
lust of half-civilized Africans.
You can also get a clear picture by reading the Southern press's editorials of the time, such as this one from the Richmond newspaper:
‘The people of the South,’ says a contemporary, ‘are not fighting for
slavery but for independence.’ Let us look into this matter. It is an
easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy — a heresy
calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor
peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine
is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY
DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the
preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork.
Or you can read the speeches, such as this one by Alexander Stephens of Virginia, at the various secession sessions:
The
great truth, I repeat, upon which our system rests, is the inferiority
of the African. The enemies of our institutions ignore this truth. They
set out with the assumption that the races are equal; that the negro is
equal to the white man. If their premises were correct, their
conclusions would be legitimate. But their premises being false, their
conclusions are false also. Most of that fanatical spirit at the North
on this subject, which in its zeal without knowledge, would upturn our
society and lay waste our fair country, springs from this false
reasoning. Hence so much misapplied sympathy for fancied wrongs and
sufferings. These wrongs and sufferings exist only in their heated
imaginations. There can be no wrong where there is no violation of
nature’s laws. We have heard much of the higher law. I believe myself in
the higher law. We stand upon that higher law. I would defend and
support no constitution that is against the higher law. I mean by that
the law of nature and of God. Human constitutions and human laws that
are made against the law of nature or of God, ought to be overturned;
and if Seward was right the Constitution which he was sworn to support,
and is now requiring others to swear to support, ought to have been
overthrown long ago. It ought never to have been made. But in point of
fact it is he and his associates in this crusade against us, who are
warring against the higher law—we stand upon the laws of the Creator,
upon the highest of all laws. It is the fanatics of the North, who are
warring against the decrees of God Almighty, in their attempts to make
things equal which he made unequal. My assurance of ultimate success in
this controversy is strong from the conviction, that we stand upon the
right.
The only "states right" the South was interested in defending was the right to hold slaves. So please: The next time someone whips out that hoary old lie, just remember that it belongs with all the other false history woven into "Lost Cause" nonsense.
'Lynched': This was a popular postcard in the 1920s, as were other photographs of lynched African Americans, and were frequently kept as memorabilia.
Some of you may recall that today, April 1, is more than just April Fools Day -- it's also the first day of Confederate Heritage Month, as recently declared by Mississippi's governor.
Now, I know a lot of Southerners like Gov. Bryant would just as soon we mostly devoted our excursions in Confederate history and its lingering heritage to sipping mint juleps and treating ourselves to multiple viewings of Gone With the Wind and other similar renditions of history -- you know, the kind that promote the old "Lost Cause" mythology and which has been widely adopted in the decades since the war by Confederate apologists who successfully revised the history of the Civil War. It's also worth noting that Mississippi rather pointedly does not celebrate Black History Month.
So it seems to me that we should indeed begin celebrating Confederate Heritage Month, broadly, as a national project, so that we can finally begin teaching all of our children, inside the South and out, its REAL heritage: the heritage of slavery and why it was maintained, the heritage of a treasonous Civil War fought not for abstractions such as "states rights" but truly for the maintenance of slavery, the heritage of night-riding Ku Klux Klansmen, of thousands of lynchings of black people, of Jim Crow rule, and public-institution segregration, and of the vicious, desperate and cruel campaign to maintain all of that during the Civil Rights struggle.
For starters, let's review the history of lynching in the old Confederacy, that consummate "pastoral scene from the gallant South," as Billie Holliday sang.
Lynching (the word was even in Southern in its origins, having derived from a Virginia judge who endorsed extralegal violence against Loyalists during the Revolutionary War) was the central linchpin, as it were, in the post-Civil War suppression of African Americans. The extreme terrorization of the black community was essential to preventing them from ever working to overturn Jim Crow voter-disenfranchisement law, or the legal segregation of all public institutions (including washrooms, drinking fountains, and swimming pools, as well as schools).
The lynching of six African Americans
in Lee County, Georgia, in 1916
Sexual paranoia was central to the lynching phenomenon. In the years
following black emancipation -- during which time a previously tiny
class of black criminals became swelled by the ranks of impoverished
former slaves -- a vast mythology arose surrounding black men’s supposed
voracious lust for white women, a legend for which in truth there was
scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to (and perhaps
has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men’s longtime
sexual domination of black women, particularly during the slavery era.
In any event, the omnipresence of the threat of rape of white women by
black men came to be almost universally believed by American whites.
Likewise, conventional wisdom held that lynchings were a natural
response to this threat: "The mob stands today as the most potential
bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as
would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro
race," warned John Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among Northerners as well. The New York Herald,
for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad
citizens who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch
law, is largely in the fact that the good citizens live where their
wives and daughters are perfectly safe."
The cries of rape, for many whites in both South and North, raised
fears not merely of sexual violence but of racial mixing, known commonly
as "miscegenation," which was specifically outlawed in some 30 states.
White supremacy was not only commonplace, it was in fact the dominant
worldview of Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most
Caucasians believed they represented Nature’s premier creation (having
been informed this by a broad range of social scientists of the period,
whose views eventually coalesced into the pseudo-science known as
eugenics), and that any "dilution" of those strains represented a gross
violation of the natural order. Thus it was not surprising that a number
of lynching incidents actually resulted from the discovery of
consensual relations between a black man and a white woman.
Underlying the stated fear of black rape, moreover, was a broad fear
of economic and cultural domination of white Americans by blacks and
various other "outsiders," including Jews. These fears were acute in the
South, where blacks became a convenient scapegoat for the mesh of
poverty that lingered in the decades following the Civil War. Lynching
in fact was frequently inspired not by criminality, but by any signs of
economic and social advancement by blacks who, in the view of whites,
had become too "uppity."
A classic instance of this occurred in the little East Texas town of
Center, about sixty miles due north of Jasper, in 1920. The victim was a
black teenager named Lige Daniels, who was accused of killing an
elderly white woman who lived in Center. When word reached the governor
that mob violence was imminent, he wired the captain of the Seventh
Cavalry stationed nearby to protect the prisoner. The cavalry, however,
never showed. The captain later explained that he had been unable to
"find any members of his company in time for mobilization."
So at
about noon on August 3, 1920, a mob of about one thousand men stormed
the Center jail, knocked down the steel doors, and dragged Daniels
outside, where they proceeded to beat him severely. A rope was thrown
over a nearby oak tree, and Daniels was then hanged.
The lynching of Lige Daniels,
Center, Texas, 1920
A photo postcard that was available for many years afterward, mostly in
the backwaters of trinket shops, recorded the event. It is a remarkable
photo, and not only for the warm glow of the sun peering through the oak
tree and bathing Lige Daniels' corpse, hanging from the bough, in an
almost angelic light. What makes the portrait unforgettable instead is
the crowd gathered below—stern-faced fathers and laborers, all looking
quite proud of themselves; and a handful of children. One young boy (he
appears to be about ten), dressed in his Sunday shirt and tie, is
beaming beatifically. He probably remembered that day till he died.
The lynching of Jessie Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916
There
were many such postcards. Perhaps the most notorious were those from
the lynching of another black teenager, Jessie Washington, by a mob of
several thousand residents of Waco, Texas, on May 16, 1916. Washington,
who was retarded, had confessed to the murder of an elderly Waco
resident. At the moment his conviction (with four minutes' deliberation
by a white jury) was announced, the mob surged forward into the
courtroom and dragged Washington outside, where he was stripped, beaten,
stabbed, and wrapped with a chain, which was draped over a tree limb,
just above a pyre of wooden crates. Washington was then jerked twice
into the air, and his body lowered onto the pyre, where he was sprinkled
with coal oil and set alight.
Afterward, mob members proudly
strung the charred corpse back up for a brief public display, after
which Washington's body was lassoed by a horseman and dragged around the
town until the skull bounced loose. Some motorists then tossed his
remains into a black bag, tied it to the back bumper of their car, and
tooled around the countryside with it in tow. A constable finally
retrieved the bag from a nearby town, where it was left hanging.
The
lynchings of Daniels and Washington were mere drops in an ocean of
bloodshed. Between 1882 and 1942, according to statistics compiled by
the Tuskegee Institute, there were 4,713 lynchings in the United States,
of which 3,420 involved black victims. Mississippi topped the list,
with 520 blacks lynched during that time period, while Georgia was a
close second with 480; Texas' 339 ranked third. And most scholars
acknowledge that these numbers probably are well short of the actual
total, since many lynchings (particularly in the early years of the
phenomenon) were often backwoods affairs that went utterly unrecorded.
In that era, it was not at all uncommon for a black man to simply
disappear; sometimes his body might wash up in one of the local rivers,
and sometimes not.
The violence reached a fever pitch in the
years 1890-1902, when 1,322 lynchings of blacks (out of 1,785 total
lynchings) were recorded at Tuskegee, which translates into an average
of over 110 lynchings a year. The trend began to decline afterward, but
continued well into the 1930s, leading some historians to refer to the
years 1880-1930 as the "lynching period" of American culture.
The lynching of Rubin Stacy, Florida, 1935
There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the
participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from
the postcards themselves -- many of which can be seen at the Without Sanctuary
site -- as they frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim
but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning.
Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally
given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a
migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and
frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round
the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression
as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.
Indeed,
lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community.
Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds
of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards,
memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with
which the victim was hanged. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or
genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as
a warning to would-be black criminals.
That was the purported
moral purpose of these demonstrations, at least in the South: Not only
to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes against
whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future
perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which
described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the
victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined
men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces)
not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to
keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners’ reports from
lynchings merely described the victims’ deaths occurring "at the hands
of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude,
but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will.
This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as
symbolic of the region's continuing economic and cultural oppression by
the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia, Herald and Advertiser
explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the
ocean's tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of
our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under
foot."
Thus the numbers of deaths produced by the lynching
phenomenon only hint at their impact, which broadly affected literally
millions of more Americans, effectively keeping them in the thrall of
terror that their white neighbors might, with the least provocation,
murder them horribly.
Of course, the threat of the rape of white
women and other pretenses for lynching presented handy pretexts for
these horrors. As always, the violence was predicated on a fear of
future violence; lynching was excused as a preemptive act.
Yet in
reality a black person could be lynched for literally no reason at all
-- in some cases, simply for defending himself from physical assault, or
for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lynching laughed
at the notion of blacks advancing through hard work; moderately
prosperous blacks who managed to do so were often the first targets of
angry lynch mobs intent on dealing with "uppity" blacks.
Lynchings
unquestionably had the short-term desired effect of suppressing blacks'
civil rights; the majority of African Americans in the South during
that era led lives of quiet submission in the hope of escaping that
horrific fate, and relatively few aspired beyond their established
station in life. Those who did often migrated northward, where lynchings
were hardly unknown (some of the most notorious occurred in places like
Indiana and Minnesota, and they in fact were recorded in nearly every
state in the Union), but were not as endemic. However, the awfulness of
the mobs' brutality, often reported and photographed in gruesome detail,
ultimately also inspired a reaction that gave birth to the Civil Rights
movement and eventually the demise of the racial caste system lynching
was intended to enforce.
There is a scene in the documentary Blackfish in which, via archival footage, we see a young Jeffrey
Ventre during his SeaWorld trainer days giving a spiel to his audience during a
show when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a large killer whale comes flying
across the haulout on which he’s standing and goes skidding past him within
inches, then plunges back into its pool.
Ventre seems genuinely surprised, and the footage shows him
talking to one of his fellow trainers (Mark Simmons, it turns out), saying:
“You dork!”
By all appearances, the moment captured in the footage
seemed to underscore the extent to which those trainers are actually at the
mercy of the whales they’re supposed to be controlling and their whims. After
all, even a minor deviation in their routines could result in disaster for the
humans in their pools: If the orca had been a few inches closer and come out a
few seconds earlier, Ventre would have been pancaked.
But in reality, as Ventre, explained to me recently, the
whole stunt was planned. “The orca was Taima, and yes it was a staged
behavior,” he said. “It came off well because Taima (later banned from
waterwork with humans) came up early.”
So in many regards the moment seemingly demonstrates the
extent to which the trainers actually could control the killer whales. But even
that, Ventre says, is a deeply deceptive illusion: “The spectacle of the
production,” he said, “does center around SeaWorld's ability to manipulate and
control the world's top predator.”
That all seemingly came to an end this week, with SeaWorld’s
announcement that it would immediately cease its orca breeding program, as
well as its circus-style orca performances. Future orca
shows, the company says, will emphasize “natural behaviors”, though the
company insists it will not consider seapens or other options for the remaining
orcas in its collection, saying “the orcas at SeaWorld will stay in our parks.”
Outside of the relatively cloistered world of animal-rights
activism (as well as the business-investment world), the announcement seemed interesting
and even momentous, but not necessarily world-shaking. But make no mistake: the
paradigm shifted in an important way this week, announcing, potentially, a
deeper social change. Something profound and, if sustained, deeply good: a deep
shift in humankind’s relationship to the natural world, and ultimately to each
other.
***
Seeing any killer whale in the flesh inspires awe, captive
or wild. Even behind the glass and concrete of a captivity pool, it’s hard not
be struck by the majesty of the animal: It is so big, so powerful, so
beautiful, its intense intelligence unmistakable.
In the wild, seeing orcas is a joyous, inspirational thing,
because it feels so innately right. The animals themselves are spontaneous and
joyful in their behavior, even when they are at their most businesslike and
distant. You are seeing this astonishing creature doing what it has done for
six million years, the rulers of the ocean at home in their realm. It’s
genuinely an unforgettable experience.
However, seeing orcas in captivity brings an added twist.
The guides at the marine parks such as Sea World and Miami Seaquarium will
often tout supposed side benefits they claim that captivity of the animals
bring, such as educating young people about the oceans, “inspiring” them to
care for the animals they see, and providing important scientific research
information that helps the animals survive in the wild. The reality, however,
is that SeaWorld’s “education” programs are really low-information affairs
geared primarily to
propagandize children into visiting the park, while its
“science” record is so
laughably thin that very few real scientists engaged in conservation work
with wild whales take
them seriously.
No, what SeaWorld has been selling (at about $100 a head,
plus parking, food, and plush dolls) is not an understanding of the animals,
but a spectacle -- the jaw-dropping sight of seeing a relatively tiny human
mastering these gigantic creatures and seemingly controlling them, as trainers
like Ventre and others performed a series of precision stunts before your eyes.
The “education” that children receive at these parks is an overpowering message
that it is not only right, but admirable, that we humans keep wild animals
under our power through a system of dominance and control.
“The story of man's dominion has been told numerous times,
most notably in the movie King Kong,” Ventre wrote to me in a thoughtful
missive last May, noting that this narrative works well with an astonishingly
large and powerful creature like a killer whale: “There are larger carnivores,
including sperm whales, but no equal to Orcinus orca in terms of the
sophisticated brain, cooperative hunting methods, and killing equipment.
Trainers’ relationships with the orcas, in terms of
dominance and control, is complicated, he explained:
I agree that in any given waterwork show or session, the
orca is in charge, however, SeaWorld does have the ultimate leverage.
Food.
This is why the topic of food deprivation is crucial to the
debate and also why it is shameful that SeaWorld is trying to deny its use,
lately. It is part of the daily existence of some whales at all parks during
different time periods. How else do you get animals to separate from their
mothers or stay motionless for teeth drilling procedures?
Predictable whales such as Katina (and formerly her daughter
Kalina) have been referred to as "Cadillacs." She has been the
matriarch or co-matriarch of the Florida facility for 30+ years. She is known
to the trainers as a "business woman," compliant, reliable, and
expecting payment. She is well paid in fish.She expects to be paid and SeaWorld keeps her happy. Katina is probably
the corporation's single most valuable asset as she has produced many
offspring, and runs a tight ship, preferring order over disorder in her
artificial pod.She controls things to
her liking, and the training management loves that. Kasatka, whom I have never
worked with, is also a dominant female, but unlike Katina, and as seen in Blackfish, has a long track record of attacks on trainers.
A predictable matriarch allows for consistent live public
shows with killer whales. Without that the show production suffers. Katina has
trained dozens of killer whale trainers including
myself.
Katina is aware of her situation and as matriarch carves out
a life for herself and her offspring to the best of her ability. Analogous to a
prison guard being cooperative with the warden to make life better.
Then there are the other animals that are less predictable.
Animals that I worked directly with in this category include Taima, her mother
Gudurn, Tilikum, and Kanduke. These animals were also aware of their
surroundings and were not as interested in working with the training staff.
This caused them to have their food amounts cut, regularly, so they would
comply with commands or not disrupt shows.
No one knows what he was thinking, but Tilikum has killed
three humans, including two of his trainers. For reference, Kanduke was
actually more feared than Tilikum, although he lived a shorter life, pre-Internet,
so his antics are less known. These orcas (plus Kasatka, Orkid, Ky, Keto) all
developed track records that made them unsafe to get into the water with. So,
in that sense, they are definitely in charge.
Sociologist Susan Gray Davis discussed the illusory aspect
of SeaWorld’s shows last spring during Voice
of San Diego’s sponsored debate, between SeaWorld’s defenders and its
critics, over orca captivity. While studying the question of what people
actually learn at marine parks like SeaWorld, she came to the conclusion that
it all came down to entertainment, particularly the big orca circus shows put
on at the its various Shamu Stadiums:
I think they are the key to the brand. It’s the model for
the human-animal interaction that occurs at SeaWorld. It really expresses a lot
of tension, because it combines the fascination with these animals with an
enthusiasm for subtly, but maybe not subtly, humans being in charge of the
animals. So there’s this big, beautiful powerful wild animal that is also being
controlled by a human being. It’s done in a very skillful, very artful way, but
that’s essentially what people are seeing in the shows.
So the kind of “environmental” education that occurs at
these parks is not in any sense a forward-looking effort that helps young
people take a more enlightened approach to their own futures. It is instead a
reflection of what the cetacean-captivity industry is really about – namely,
just another iteration of the systems of dominance and control that embody
traditional Western Civilization, values that we know are killing the planet.
This is something deeply embedded in our culture – so deeply
that it may take generations to root out. It comes out of the same components
of our wiring that have brought us such depredations as slavery, war, genocide,
psychopathy, and environmental degradation.
The enlightened parts of our society have worked hard over
the centuries to root out these phenomena, because they understand that they
are ultimately self-destructive and ultimately evil – with varying degrees of
success. Slavery has diminished dramatically, though it remains a fact in many
corners of the underdeveloped Third World and even in the slimier corners of
developed society. Genocide is not as common a phenomena as it was a century
ago, but the threat of it hangs over us like a dark cloud. War and psychopathy
and environmental degradation are very much still with us.
Orca captivity, as it happens, gives us a unique window on
the reality that these systems of dominance and control are, in the end,
utterly illusory. And perhaps even more interestingly, it is the orcas
themselves – and particularly their wild societies, whose foundations emerge
from a profound empathy – who may be able to show us a way out.
***
Animal-rights activist Michael Mountain has
written eloquently about how the fear of death has drastically distorted
human behavior, particularly in Western Civilization, leading humans to create
a domain for themselves separate from the natural world, a system of dominance
and control that extends to every facet of human endeavor.
Our central problem, as humans, is that as much as we reach
for the stars and create profoundly beautiful works of art, we cannot escape
the knowledge that, just like all the other animals, we are destined to die, go
into the ground, and become food for worms.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, social anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote that
the awareness we humans have of our personal mortality creates a level of
anxiety that drives much of our behavior. Certainly other animals experience
bursts of terror in the face of death, but for us humans it’s a lifelong
awareness, and one that brings about a chronic level of anxiety that we spend
our whole lives – and build whole civilizations and cultures – trying to cope
with.
And so it is that, to alleviate the anxiety we feel over our
animal nature, we try to separate ourselves from our fellow animals and to
exert control over the natural world. We tell ourselves we’re superior to them
and that they exist for our benefit.
We treat them as commodities and resources, use them as
biomedical “models” or “systems” in research, and force them to perform for our
entertainment in circuses and theme parks.
To the extent that companion animals fare better, this is
largely because we’ve come to treat them less as animals and more as family –
part of our human “in-group” to whom we can relate a bit like children.
We even enshrine the abuse of animals in our most sacred
belief systems. The Catholic Catechism, for example, states that “Animals, like
plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of
past, present, and future humanity.”
These belief systems also offer us hope in some form of
immortality that’s not accorded the other animals. They’re just one of the ways
we have of distancing ourselves from the rest of nature, and they’ve become so
embedded in our cultures that they’re typically not even questioned, much less
stopped.
But, as in all forms of denial, we cannot escape what we
are. And the more we try to bend nature to our will, the more we end up harming
the planet and all its living creatures, quite possibly now beyond repair.
This fear, as Mountain demonstrates, has twisted Western
culture in profound ways, particularly as people have engaged in the machinery
of death itself – namely, war. Throughout history, war and conquest have not
only shaped our societies but have in turn become products of them, like a dog
chasing its tail: Violence begetting violence. Even as we attempt to assert our
systems of dominance and control over our world, we sow the seeds of our own
destruction.
Moreover, warmaking has shaped us as individuals, since it
has always been inextricably bound up with cultural conceptions of heroism and
virtue, and these conceptions have in turn driven the shape of how we wage war
and otherwise build our dominance systems – fueled, most often, by the urge to
eliminate.
The adulation of heroes arises out of a basic human need, as
Becker put it in other work, to feel good about ourselves, to know ourselves as
heroes. In the West, the heroic task historically has entailed energetically
taking up arms to redeem the world. It also entails creating an enemy and
naming him; the heroic warrior, after all, needs an enemy against which to
fight, something to give his life meaning. The drama that results is a holy war
to drive out an alien darkness or disease, and it is a drama that has played
out innumerable times throughout the long history of the West.
Yet, as James Aho observes in This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy, the heroic
dynamic has played out differently in different cultures. In the East, he
notes, the martial-arts hero is perfected by becoming "absorbed in a cycle
that is larger than himself," subsumed by eternal spiritual principles
with which he has become aligned. But this is not the case in the Occident:
In civilizations that have come under Judeo-Christian and
Muslim influence -- which is to say, among others, modern Europe and America --
chaos is experienced as the product of disobedience regarding ethical duties,
not mere ritual infractions, as these have been revealed through prophecy.
Here, then, the heroic task becomes one not of passively yielding to the Way
but of energetically taking up weapons to reform the world after the personal
commandments of the Holy One. The
Occidental holy war functions to sterilize the world of an alien darkness or
disease, not to reconcile man to its inevitability, particularly its
inevitability in himself.
This expiative impulse, in the West at least, became closely
associated with Christianity during the early Middle Ages, especially in the
later phases of the Holy Roman empire, when Church doctrine regarding the
nature of sin developed into a deep psychological fixation regarding the
impurity of the flesh. It gave birth to a deep streak of eliminationism: the
extreme objectification of other people grouped into a target, manifested as
the dehumanization, demonization, and otherwise degradation of that target
group into an object fit only for elimination.
This streak manifested itself on the European continent in
the form of pogroms and inquisitions, of which the Spanish
Inquisition is only the most infamous, with its autos-da-fe and
multiple pogroms, in which some 3,000 to 5,000 people were executed and
thousands more tortured.
Historian David E. Stannard's text American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World explores these
historical roots of genocide in European culture in some depth. As he observes
(pp.154-155), the Augustinian doctrine of worldly sin equated all the natural
world with evil and brutality, including such natural impulses as sex. Indeed,
any wild place was conceived of as innately evil; only the purifying power of
civilization could safeguard us from death and darkness. Africa was named “the
dark continent” for a reason.
Death and sex thus became inextricably bound up in the
Western mind: the former was inevitably a product of the latter, and any
dabbling in it led inevitably to darkness and destruction. Women, in
particular, became conceived of as the font of such impulses.
As Stannard explains, such "learned and saintly
medieval urgings" were part of a medieval worldview that created a culture
that "became something truly to behold," one in which the effort to
purge oneself of base sinfulness gave birth to a panoply of bizarre and painful
self-inflictions. He cites a passage from a "not untypical" devout
friar, described by Norman Cohn, who
shut himself up in his cell and stripped himself naked ...
and took up his scourge with the sharp spikes, and beat himself on the body and
on the arms and legs, till blood poured off him as from a man who has been
cupped. One of the spikes on the scourge was bent crooked, like a hook, and
whatever flesh it caught it tore off. He beat himself so hard that the scourge
broke into three bits and the points flew against the wall. ...
Eventually, this hatred of sex was expressed in an
abiding misogyny that identified women with the putrefication of the
natural world and the source of worldly evil. It also identified the outside
world with untamed nature and thus with wanton sinfulness. As Stannard writes,
"there also lurked in distant realms demi-brutes who lived carnal and
savage lives in wilderness controlled by Satan."
This view of the "uncivilized" world as populated
by creatures who were perhaps only passably human also preceded Christianity by
several centuries. Greek poets like Homer and Hesiod often described an outside
world populated by demigods and other half-human races. Pliny the Elder, in the
first century A.D., described in his Natural
History peoples of far-off lands with fantastic traits, including people
whose faces are embedded in their chests, or have the heads of dogs, or hooves
instead of feet, or ears so long or lips so large they use them as coverings.
Notably, he also famously provided the first recorded description of Orcinus orca, which Pliny insisted
“could be described as nothing other than a gigantic mass of flesh armed with
rows of teeth.” Later on, the “orc” was described by various Renaissance poets
as a voracious monster who prowled the seas and dined on sailors and maidens.
As this myth-making was incorporated into Christian culture,
it was assumed that the strangeness of these "monstrous" races of men
described by Pliny, linked to the outcast lineage of Cain, was product of their
innate sinfulness and downcast nature. "So great was their alienation from
the world of God's -- or the gods' -- most favored people, in fact,"
writes Stannard, "that well into late antiquity they commonly were denied the
label of 'men.'"
Eventually, by the later Middle Ages, this fascination with
"monstrous" races evolved into an interest in the "wild
man" who it was believed inhabited the unexplored wildernesses of the
world. This was the standard view of the peoples who explorers eventually
encountered populations of humans living on the American continents when the
age of exploration began after 1492 -- if these were men at all, they were at
best only half so.
Thus the eliminationist impulse was transmitted almost
seamlessly from Europe to the Americas, where it actually grew in a more
virulent form that went hand in hand with an expansionist impulse. Indeed,
Americans generally displayed a wanton disregard for the humanity of the native
peoples that only intensified as they marched farther westward.
All of this social conditioning came home with a vengeance
in the centuries that followed, for the native peoples of the Americas, who had
no natural immunity to diseases that had run their course through the European
society that brought them to their shores. Whereas smallpox for Europeans
produced unpleasant pockmarks and scars, among Native Americans the disease
caused huge, gaping wounds and flesh that fell off their bodies, and of course
an eventual and horrible death. Other European diseases -- cholera, measles,
scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, pertussis (whooping cough),
tuberculosis, diphtheria, and sexually transmitted diseases -- had similarly
disproportionate and devastating effects. And perhaps just as ruthless were the
Europeans who encountered these societies in retreat.
This pattern -- weakening the populace with disease, then
overpowering them with superior arms and an inhuman ruthlessness and brutality
-- was repeated endlessly throughout Americas in the ensuing decades, first
throughout Hispaniola and the Caribbean, then in Mexico itself, then in Central
and South America. The Spanish
conquest of the Yucatan and of Mexico
were only the first steps in Spain's larger
colonization program in the Americas. The result was the near-utter
obliteration of the existing civilizations.
The combination of disease and undiluted eliminationism had
a predictable effect throughout the New World. By the midpoint of the 17th
century, it's estimated that more than 50 million of the indigenous people in
the Americas had perished, some 80 percent of the population. In some instances
the devastation was nearly complete; between 1770 and 1850, nearly 95 percent
of the Pueblo population in the Southwest was eradicated. By the time Old World
diseases had spread to the farthest reaches of the continent, striking the
Haida and Inuit peoples of northwest Canada in the early 1850s, the population
of indigenous peoples in North America had had shrunk by some two-thirds or
more. (There is an ongoing debate over the actual numbers, more of which you
can read here.)
The only recorded example of a government effort to reduce
the effects of disease on the native population came early in the 19th century,
when the United States, according to Abraham Bergman's "A Political
History of the Indian Health Service," began providing federal health
services for Indians in the early 1800's -- but their primary purpose was to
protect U.S. soldiers from contamination from nearby tribes. All the first
vaccination programs were in the vicinity of military posts.
Complicating their reluctance to aid people whose humanity
was evidently uncertain was the context of their worldview: for much of their
early history on the American continent, white Europeans saw the Enemy as being
Wilderness, the implacable, alien, deadly swamp whose subjugation it was their
mission to impose.
The European
conception of wilderness which white immigrants brought to the Americas was
complex and shaded, but it was ultimately rooted in a worldview that placed
Europe and Christian civilization at the center of the world, the source of
civilization and light. The wilderness was the embodiment of sinfulness and
evil -- and so were its inhabitants. And their elimination was an essential
component of the conquest.
This was true not merely of the human inhabitants, but its
animals as well. Threatening creatures -- cougars, bears and wolves especially
-- were hunted to near-extinction. Even wild food sources such as salmon were
wantonly harvested and their habitat destroyed, especially as dams were erected
on every river on the Eastern Seaboard they inhabited. Stocks were not only
depleted but intentionally wasted.
Lt. Campbell Hardy, an officer of the Royal Artillery in New
Brunswick, observed the mentality in action in Nova Scotia in 1837, where
once-plentiful salmon stocks were already plummeting:
"The spirit of wanton extermination is rife; and it has
been well remarked, it really seems as though the man would be loudly applauded
who was discovered to have killed the last salmon."
Perhaps even more symbolic was the fate of the grizzly bear, which
at one time ruled both the Plains and the mountain ranges of the open West. But
between 1850 and 1920, grizzlies were systematically
and ruthlessly exterminated everywhere humans came into contact with them,
effectively eliminated from 95 percent of their traditional range.
The same was true of the native peoples who dwelt in this
wilderness. It was common for colonists to view the wilderness as capable of
overwhelming civilized men, even from within, turning them into
"savages" and "wild men," while the people who had lived
there for centuries were commonly viewed as no less than vile beasts
themselves.
Yet, even as Western man made contact with these “human
beasts” and proceeded to eliminate their presence, the seeds were sown for the
destruction of the very systems of dominance and control they tried to impose
on their world.
***
Native Americans were only the first such ostensible
quasi-humans who were victimized by the streak of eliminationism that coursed
through European culture, but the genocide of the American Indians established
a pattern that was repeated in succeeding episodes.
First there was an abiding and cold-blooded ruthlessness:
“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” infamously muttered U.S. Cavalry
Gen. Philip Sheridan,
and soon “The only good is a dead Indian” was the byword of Western settlers.
More pointedly, Col. Chivington’s infamous exhortation to his troops before
they murdered women and children at Sand Creek -- “Nits
make lice!” -- made irrevocably clear that the elimination intended was
utter and total and devoid of any vestige of humanity. That trait was
manifested with vicious finality in the last of the great Indian massacres at
Wounded Knee, when the bodies of the unarmed women and children were thrown
into a pit like cordwood -- a scene that would be repeated across the sea more
than fifty years later.
Even as the ostensible threat posed by the “wild men” of the
Americas was being obliterated, though, white Americans found another target
for their eliminationist impulse: African Americans, former slaves now
liberated (formally, at least) by the outcome of the Civil War. Initially,
blacks in the South were targeted for terrorist violence by night-riding
Klansmen and Redshirts during the Reconstruction Era, to such devastating
effect that the verdict of the war was functionally overturned, Reconstruction
itself nullified, and Jim Crow segregation imposed.
In the years that followed, a mythology (often invoked to
defend the memory of the Confederacy) developed about black people, and black
men in particular, steeped in the twisted sexual fantasies (and guilt) of
European white culture: namely, that black men were sexually ravenous, inclined
to rape and assorted sex crimes, and in need of social control. This mythology
became the fodder for a
thousand lynching bonfires across America.
"The Negro race," after all, was still closely
associated with the jungles of Africa, the "heart of darkness" in the
European mind; and sexual voraciousness was assumed in such folk, for though
tame they might be, they still were scarcely a step removed from wild men of
the jungle themselves; still scarcely human. Yet this was a legend for which in
truth there was scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to (and
perhaps has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men's longtime
sexual domination of black women, particularly during the slavery era.
In any event, the omnipresence of the threat of rape of
white women by black men came to be almost universally believed by American
whites. Likewise, conventional wisdom held that lynchings were a natural
response to this threat: "The mob stands today as the most potent bulwark
between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate
the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race," warned John
Temple Graves, editor of the Atlanta
Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among
Northerners as well. The New York Herald,
for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad citizens
who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch law, is largely in
the fact that the good citizens live where their wives and daughters are
perfectly safe."
Lynching violence (which claimed the lives of several
thousand black people over the years) soon gave way to race riots -- in which
entire black populations were driven out of communities in which they had often
spent generations -- and their logical end products, “sundown
towns” from which black people were forbidden from setting foot after dark,
upon pain of a horrific and brutal death. There were literally thousands of
such towns spread all over the United States, in every state and region.
All of these phenomena were essential tools with which
whites imposed their system of dominance and control on the rest of the
American populace, as well as on one another. Miscegenation -- also known as
“racial mixing” -- was outlawed in 30 of the then-48 states.
All this came at the height of the eugenics
phenomena, from 1910-1935 -- eugenics being the pseudo-scientific theory
that argued for genetics and racial “purity” as the ultimate distillation of
man’s evolutionary climb, producing eventually “superior” races capable of
lifting humanity out of the mire of the dark world and into the light of
civilization. It ultimately produced some of the darkest atrocities in the
annals of American science, including euthanasia and sterilization programs,
the legacy of which still haunts the scientific community.
Among the chief objects of eliminationist paranoia promoted
by the eugenicists were Asians -- particularly the Japanese immigrants who
began coming to American shores in larger numbers at the turn of the 20th
century. The eugenicists warned of the dire threat of the “Yellow Peril” -- a
conspiracy theory claiming that Japan intended to colonize the United States by
sending farmers who would “outbreed” the white populace eventually, and pave
the way for the ultimate goal of a Japanese imperial invasion of the West
Coast.
The ferment created by this hysteria led to the passage of the 1924
Immigration Act -- also known as the “Asian Exclusion Act” -- which first
codified the American concept of an “illegal alien” and outlawed all further
immigration from Japan and other Asian nations. Yet because a large number of
immigrants remained on American shores, the paranoia never fully subsided, and
in fact flared back into full roar after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and in
turn produced one of the great atrocities of American history, the mass
incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
That war, however, proved a critical turning point. The
white supremacist worldview had reached its apotheosis in Europe, in the German
Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler, once again fueled by conspiracy theories,
focused this time on Jews and other “inferior races,” and eventually produced
perhaps the most devastating genocidal enterprise in history, the Holocaust, in which
some eight million people -- six million of them Jews -- perished. And at the
end of the war, when the lid was peeled back and the corpses of the death camps
were revealed for all to see, the world turned away, permanently repelled by
what white supremacism and its eliminationism had produced.
Fittingly, much of the academic world had already begun to
turn away from the Darwinistic evolutionary worldview that undergirded the
belief in white supremacy, and after the war embraced with both arms the views
that had been gradually emerging from the field of anthropology regarding the
folly of branding races and cultures “superior” and “inferior,” a worldview
that came be known as “multiculturalism” or “cultural relativism.”
And for that, ironically, they largely had a little Jewish
man to thank: Franz Boas.
***
Franz Boas is today considered the father of modern
anthropology, but when he arrived in Alert Bay, British Columbia, in 1886, he
was just another student of what was then considered a promising new field,
though he had already made something of a name for himself by challenging the
current orthodoxy regarding the reigning evolutionary approach to cultural
studies, which proposed a model in which societies progressed through a set of
hierarchic technological and cultural stages, culminating in a white patriarchy
as the summit of evolution. Certainly he had some natural skepticism, as these
theories had already been applied in the service of anti-Semites who claimed
through the findings of phrenology (the pseudo-science of skull size) that Jews
were an “inferior” race.
A Kwakwaka'wakw man demonstrates a ceremonial
killer-whale mask in a photo from Boas' collection.
Boas traveled among the Northwest coastal tribes a great
deal and collected information and tribal legends from around the region, but
he wound up spending much of his time in Alert Bay, home of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw people,
better known as the Kwakiutl. The Kwakwaka'wakw are a fascinating tribe, with a
rich and deeply artistic culture. Their totem poles are among the most renowned
of all the coastal tribes for their size and beauty, and the tribe’s fierce
insistence on retaining its culture even today is embodied by the jaw-dropping
collection of ceremonial transformation masks that can be viewed at its cultural center.
The Kwakwaka'wakw also coexisted with killer whales, whom
they revered as beings of great spiritual power. Their origin myth, indeed,
tells of orcas who came to shore and took on the shape of humans, and when they
encountered the whales in their canoes, they believed they were communing with
their ancestors, who were being good to them by driving the salmon into their
waters. Their legends describe the blackfish as the people under the sea,
people who live in villages like their own in a watery kingdom, and sometimes a
tribal princess would marry a blackfish prince, and good fortune would befall
that family for generations; however, even throwing a stone or launching an
arrow in the direction of an orca would bring about generations of misfortune.
It is now recognized that the killer whale societies of the Northwest are
functionally matriarchal -- not only are their pods arranged matrilineally,
their cultures appear to be arranged as matriarchies, with postmenopausal
females actually leading most of the pods in their daily decision-making.
Now, there is no indication in Kwakwaka'wakw mythology that the people of the
tribe recognized this -- most of their legends describe the people under the
sea as being led by male chiefs (perhaps understandable, given the imposing
physical presence of most male resident orcas, who can reach 32 feet in length
and 14,000 pounds, with six-foot dorsal fins). But it is likely not merely a
coincidence that a number of Kwakwaka'wakw villages were led by female chiefs
and were decidedly matriarchal societies.
Boas observed this, and noted particularly that these matriarchal tribes had in
fact evolved from patriarchal societies that had failed or foundered for one
reason or another. It gave him real traction for attacking the notion that all
societies naturally evolved into patriarchies. Some of these matriarchal
traditions had been transmitted from some of their northern neighbors.
A phrenologist at work
Having made this paradigm shift, Boas turned his attention
to a component of white-supremacist orthodoxy, namely scientific racism, or the
eugenics-derived notion that race is a biological concept and that human
behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics,
and he similarly deconstructed it as demonstrably unscientific. Boas
demonstrated that skull size and cranial shape, based on skeletal studies he
pioneered, was in fact highly malleable, depending on environmental factors
such as health and nutrition, and not a stable trait dependent on race, as the phrenologists claimed.
These findings and many others laid the groundwork for a worldview that
ultimately destroyed and replaced white supremacism as the dominant model for
modern global society -- replaced it with a model in which all cultures have
innate value and, as an ethical matter, deserve our respect; in which entire
peoples are not branded “inferior” or “superior” but are afforded the rights
and opportunities all people deserve; in which warmaking is condemned as
destructive and communitarianism is celebrated as a source of well-being for
all people; in which power comes not from what we can personally accrue, but
from what we can do to empower the people who share the world with us; in which dominance and control are replaced, as stabilizing mechanisms, with cooperation and sustained mutual well-being.
Fundamentally, that is an empathetic society. Scientists
are now discovering that we most advance, evolutionarily speaking, when we
are a cooperative society. And ironically, that is the one important lesson
that killer whales have to teach us -- namely, that empathy is an evolutionary
advantage. It is only a vulnerability in a pathological society, like the Old
World from which we are trying to emerge.
So, perhaps it is fitting that today we can turn to the same wellspring of
transformative thought as a touchstone for examining not just our relationship
with each other as humans, but our species’ relationship to the world in which
we live and to the animals who inhabit it. We would do well to learn from the
people who themselves have gleaned real wisdom from being in the world of
whales.
The cornerstone of Kwakwaka’waka religious thought is the
codependency of all of nature; no part of the natural order can exist without
the rest. There is no such thing as self-sufficiency, whether for humans or
their tribes, for animals or the supernatural beings whose powers they represent.
Humans are somewhat naturally at the center of their universe, but they accept
that all other members of their common world possess not just an indestructible
and unique quality, but a spiritual and material parity in that world.
“Kwakiutl religion represents the concern of the people to occupy their own
proper place within the total system of life, and to act responsibly within it,
so as to acquire and control the powers that sustain life,” explained Boas’
student, Irving Goldman, in his study of the tribe's theology, The Mouth of Heaven.
These concerns find their clearest expression in the
mythology of animals and the supernatural beings who take their forms. In the
Kwakwaka’waka world, humans and animals have real kinship, reflected in the
view of killer whales as their ancestors; they have social and spiritual ties
that can never be severed. Indeed, they believe that when the tribesmen who
hunt marine mammals die, they return to the undersea village of their orca
ancestors. In this universe, humans are the recipients of powers, and the
givers of those powers are the animals and the supernatural forces they
represent. Of all the animals in their universe, the orca is the most powerful,
one of the few (along with the raven, the otter, and the wolf) capable of
giving a man enough power to become a shaman.
Acquiring a worldview like this does not require us to
submit to a belief in supernatural beings, but it does require us to abjure our
arrogance, which, as we have seen, is already at the core of our relationship
not just with killer whales, but our world generally. Killer whales inherently
challenge our assumptions of species superiority, as well as supremacy. Beyond
being merely physically more powerful (at least, without tools or technology),
orcas can challenge us in the realm of intellectual prowess as well,
particularly given the added dimension with which they can gather information
about our world and their proven ability to manipulate acoustics to do that. It
is also hard to argue with six million years of actual supremacy as the
undisputed lords of the oceans when it comes to evolutionary success,
species-wise.
Before about 1990, we could reasonably plead ignorance about
the unflattering realities that orcas present in relation to humans, especially
the way in which what we have learned about them shines a spotlight on our own
cognitive limitations. The dirty truth of dolphin and orca studies is that they
have established fairly clearly that human beings may well lack the cognitive
capacity to understand how all cetaceans communicate; we’re just not that
acoustically sophisticated.
When we are forced to concede, as with orcas, that we are
not unique in our intelligence, that we may not be the only creatures worthy of
being considered persons, then we likewise have to reconsider our previous,
Western-grown position as special beings somehow separated from nature, with
such separation being something desirable instead of the abomination that it
would be to someone from the Kwakwaka’waka tribe. It is this latter worldview,
one that places humans on an equal, and utterly codependent, footing with
nature, as well as the spiritual components that accompany that worldview, that
in the cold light of day makes logical sense, especially when we are confronted
by the majestic truth that is an orca in full breach or a tall black fin
approaching our kayak in the fog.
This realization affects our relationship not just with killer whales, but with
all the natural world and with all the animals with whom we share it. It
demands that we discard the invented notion of animals as property and
recognize that granting them rights does not force us to lose control of the
animals we already control; it just requires us to treat them decently.
It also forces us to recognize that we cannot continue
degrading and gradually destroying the natural environment that created this
bounty of wondrous life, because we are connected to it as deeply as are the
wildlife who inhabit it. Our survival as a species, as human beings, of
everything that defines us as human, depends on its survival, and so far, it is
not looking good for any of us.
This week, however, brought us a ray of hope. The paradigm
shifted, perhaps subtly, but irrevocably.
***
The animal-rights movement, at its core (and despite the
occasional fulminations of some of its more thoughtless and self-destructive
adherents) is about empathy: Not only does it recognize the existence and
rights of the animals who come under the grasp of our systems of dominance and
control (whether wild or domesticated animals, or, in the case of SeaWorld’s
orcas, an unholy hybridization of both), but it also inherently recognizes that
abuse of any animal in our control lessens us: it shrinks our souls. There is a
reason that animal abuse is considered an early warning sign of violent
psychopathy.
Yet in the end, it is also about confronting the very forces
that threaten our extinction: a modern society whose activities threaten to
permanently alter the planet’s climate and the biological systems that depend
upon it, and whose greed and arrogance and cruelty is threatening to drive not
only a mass extinction of other species (including killer whales) on the
planet, but ultimately in the end our own demise as well.
But while nature may be “a nightmare spectacular,” violence
among our fellow animals is limited to very specific survival needs. It is we
humans who are really “soaking the planet in blood.” We like to tell ourselves
that people who commit murder and mayhem are “behaving like animals,” but
that’s not how the other animals behave. (While, for example, we humans kill
approximately 100 million sharks a year, sharks kill maybe five humans, and
mostly by accident.)
The truth is that the more we try to distance ourselves from
the other animals and place ourselves above the natural world, the more
unnatural, irrational and destructive our behavior becomes. We are not outside
of nature, and never can be.
Zoos and animal displays and amusements have a long and
fairly sordid history in Western Civilization as exemplars of the systems of
dominance and control, putting wild things in cages and making them amuse us
with tricks, evidence of our ability to dominate. The tradition dates back at
least to the
infamous animal cages maintained by Henry III and later royalty at the
Tower of London, which were opened for public viewing, and continuing through
the various menageries and animal collections maintained by the aristocracy
throughout much of Europe up through the 20th century.
But the tide has been turning against them for some time,
and not merely on the captive-orca front. Elephants -- another large and highly
intelligent mammal that in its normal habitat requires extensive room to roam
-- have in recent years become a major
point of contention among animal-rights activists and the zoo and
animal-entertainment industries, enough that recently Ringling
Brothers Circus announced it would be ending the use of elephants in their
shows. It was one of the first quakes signaling the current paradigm shift.
SeaWorld’s announcement this week, however, meant the giant
in the room had moved. SeaWorld is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, and though
it has lost much of its value in recent years, it is the force majeure of the
marine-park industry. Indeed, Manby’s announcement has already provoked a
shocked counter-response from the Association of Marine Mammal Parks, the
industry organization, which mostly decried the “assault” that SeaWorld has
endured in recent years from the animal-rights sector.
Leading the way, of course, has been virtually everyone
associated with Blackfish --
beginning with the director, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, whose skill and marvelous
aesthetic eye made the documentary so deeply compelling; as well as the film’s
cast of former SeaWorld trainers, including Jeff Ventre, Samantha Berg, John
Hargrove, Carol Ray, John Jett, and Dean Gomersall, who have been tireless in
their efforts to promote the film’s message in the three years since its
release. The “Blackfish
Effect” has gone beyond simply damaging SeaWorld’s
stock value -- it has now brought to an eventual end the period of orca
captivity, and even more, has fueled a change in the national conversation
about all kinds of animal captivity. There’s no doubt that this is a
documentary that changed the world.
Many others deserve real credit too, especially Naomi Rose
of the Animal Welfare Institute, who has been working for a generation or
longer for this outcome; Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research; Ingrid
Visser of the Orca Research Trust; and Howard Garrett of the Orca Network. All
of them are scientists (and, secondarily, animal activists) who work with wild
orcas and who have advocated tirelessly from the perspective of a deep
understanding of the wrongness of orca captivity.
Manby’s announcement makes mention of the inescapable fact
that marine parks like SeaWorld irrevocably changed the public’s understanding,
and perception, of the nature of killer whales, and no doubt for the better: We
no longer believe, like Pliny, that they are vicious, mindless killing machines
who pose a threat to any human in the water. Indeed, we have learned an
incredible amount about killer whales in the more than 50 years that they have
been held in captivity (though it must be noted that the vast majority of that
knowledge has come from studying the animals in the wild, not in captivity).
And perhaps the most important thing that we have learned is this: Orcas
do not belong in captivity.
It’s not entirely clear that Joel Manby understands that on
a deep level. What is self-evident is that, unlike previous SeaWorld CEOs, he
is a clear-eyed businessman who can read account sheets and the numbers therein
without allowing that to be affected by the pleadings of a corporate culture
that had
descended into cult-like behavior, sending
out spies and fake
demonstrators to infiltrate orca-rights activists’ events. In the end, he
understood the bottom line: SeaWorld has to transform its business model if it
hopes to survive. It can no longer depend on the awesome and illusory spectacle
of humans seemingly controlling orcas to make the turnstiles go around and keep
their stock prices afloat. It has to change with society -- and society, it is
clear, has indeed changed. So Manby pulled the plug on the longtime
stonewalling and decided to Do the Right Thing.
However, this whole momentous paradigm shift hinges on what
is, in reality, a tiny, almost imperceptible step on the part of the SeaWorld.
In terms of visitors to SeaWorld, relatively little will actually change --
they won’t be visibly affected by the end of the breeding program until there
are no more orca babies to be seen, and eventually when the captive-born
population begins to die out. The new shows will be less circus-like and, one
hopes, filled with more factual information about wild orcas than is currently
the case. But they will still be taking place in the same concrete tanks.
Manby underscored his lack of understanding of this point in
his insistence that seapens or some other retirement/sanctuary scheme is out of
the picture -- by dishonestly portraying what orca advocates hope to achieve:
Some critics want us to go even further; they want us to
“set free” the orcas currently in our care. But that's not a wise option.
Most of our orcas were born at SeaWorld, and those that were
born in the wild have been in our parks for the majority of their lives. If we
release them into the ocean, they will likely die. In fact, no orca or dolphin
born under human care has ever survived release into the wild. Even the attempt
to return the whale from “Free Willy,” Keiko, who was born in the wild, was a
failure.
Manby, of course, neglects to mention that had it been up to
SeaWorld and the rest of the marine-park industry, Keiko would have rotted in
the tiny Reino Aventura pool where he had been filmed and was slowly dying;
instead, thanks to the campaign to rescue him from that deathtrap and
eventually return him to the wild, he wound up having
seven good years of a truly quality life, far superior to what any other
captive orca experiences. It only “failed” insofar as he was never successfully
reunited with his natal pod, and so eventually resumed the human contact to
which he was accustomed, before eventually dying of a respiratory ailment that
almost certainly was a legacy of his many years in captivity.
I urge Mr. Manby to reconsider his statement about Keiko and
I ask him to understand that the quality of Keiko’s remaining years were
significantly enhanced by having an opportunity to live in an ocean sea pen
with many weeks of forays in the open ocean. The orcas in SeaWorld are living
in bare and boring enclosures. These highly intelligent animals deserve to live
their remaining years in natural environment under human care. The overwhelming
evidence of orca distress in captivity is far too great to ignore. It is a fair
request for Mr. Manby to continue to listen to the public. Not only has the
public been asking for years to end the capture and breeding of captive orcas
but the public is now asking to finally close the chapter of captive orca
history by retiring the remaining captive orcas and, at a minimum, allowing
them the opportunity to swim wild under close supervision of human care in
ocean enclosures.
The time has come for us to see orcas in captivity as a part
of our past – not a tragic part of our future. Let’s end the show now and
retire these intelligent, social, complex animals to seaside sanctuaries.
The thing is, it’s too late for SeaWorld to turn back now,
despite the pleadings of their former friends at the AMMP. The ball is rolling
now, and the momentum is unlikely to stop until orca captivity has joined
slavery and racism as relics of an ugly past.
In the bigger picture, that may seem like ultimately a small
thing. But it is the kind of small, good thing that has deeper resonances that
ripple through the foundations of our society and the shared reality that makes
it possible to cohere, to empathize, and to cooperate. To beat back the
darkness.
It is an incremental and yet momentous victory, a ray of
light that cuts deep in dark times. In a time when the forces of white
supremacism and warlike nationalism, aimed at dominance and control of “those”
people, are straining and threatening to roar back to life both in America and
elsewhere, we can use all the small good things we can get.
As Harris saw things, “Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.” Lincoln and his followers, he stated, aimed to “overturn and strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races.” For Harris, the choice was clear. Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.” The Georgia legislature ordered the printing of a thousand copies of his speech.
