We’ve discussed cultural genocide in the context of US discrimination and hatred toward undocumented immigrants, particularly hispanics, but we’ve hardly discussed genocidal attitudes toward other minorities. In “Defining Genocide,” we read about the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition in which Paul Robeson and the CRC claimed that the United States both had and continued to commit physical and cultural genocide against African Americans. The petition was largely ignored by the UN Genocide Convention and Lemkin, too, dismissed its case on the basis that, despite facing discrimination, African Americans were increasing in prosperity. Were Lemkin and the UN right to dismiss charges of genocide? Over 60 years later, African Americans still face discrimination and at times institutionalized oppression in this country.
Last month, a federal complaint was filed against the New York City Department of Education saying that “black and Hispanic students [are] disproportionately excluded from New York City’s most selective high schools because of a single-test admittance policy [that] is racially discriminatory.” Out of 165 selective high schools in the country, these eight are the only ones that adhere to a single-test admittance policy — a policy which has resulted in a disproportionately small number of African-American and Hispanic students admitted to these schools. While the test itself is not racist, its results expose deeper problems in the New York public education system. In a system where 70% of students are black and Hispanic, it doesn’t make sense that only 733 of these students were able to score high enough to get into a top school. I’ve been following this story closely, as I went to one of the eight schools, but thinking about it differently in light of our conversations about genocide.
This is not a question of whether the NYC school system is “pre-genocidal” — it obviously isn’t. But it’s a clear example of an institution inadvertently oppressing African Americans, and Mayor Bloomberg’s “life isn’t always fair” defense against the charges only serves to further that oppression. While this particular instance has not inspired violence or hateful rhetoric yet, it calls to mind larger debates on the issue of affirmative action which have historically been and continue to be very charged. If the city does make steps toward a more holistic admission process, and as a result of that, more black and Hispanic students are admitted to these elite schools causing fewer white and Asian students to get spaces, you’d best believe there will be some angry white parents on the Upper West Side.
All of this makes me think about the role that labels like “genocide” play in our society. When the UN refused to accept Paul Robeson’s charge of genocide, they effectively dismissed the African American struggle as trivial compared to events like the Holocaust. While it it is silly to play the what-if game, I can’t help but wonder, what if these complaints hadn’t been ignored? The demands African-Americans continue make would be much less ignored. The US was not held accountable for their discrimination against blacks, and in many ways are still not, particularly in the case of the mass incarceration of young black males. I don’t know if I think the UN should have affirmed Robeson’s charge, but I do know that if one chooses to see American actions against African-Americans as genocidal, then we are definitely still committing genocide to this day.
NY Times Article:
Gothamist Article about Bloomberg's response:
You – probably wisely – choose not to explore whether current or past American (and more local) policies towards African-Americans constitute genocide – it seems like that could get very messy very quickly. What you bump up against is where discrimination parts ways with genocidal processes. This case is especially interesting because it involves systematic if implicit discrimination that no one but its victims seem to recognize as a problem – which after several weeks of this class should probably raise a red flag. Still – and I don’t mean to challenge your claims, only revisit them – there is a huge difference between a society still stratified by race and wealth enough that it doesn’t like the idea of affirmative action, and a society in which a cursory glance would reveal mass murder and mutilation.
ReplyDeleteAnd so at this point I’m going to take the bait: I do think that events like the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide make the current treatment of African-Americans in the U.S. pale by comparison (not “trivial” but in a distinctly different category). Part of my reasoning is that African-Americans play roles in our society that Jews did not or could not have in pre-genocide Germany and that the Armenians did not play in Turkey. “Blackness” plays a huge part in modern culture – in literature and television but especially in music. The African-American influence in our culture is not easily hidden, and more importantly it blends in with the rest of “American culture” fairly seamlessly (Nelly made a song with Tim McGraw, right? I hope I didn’t make that up.) I think it’s also important (and clichéd) to mention Barack Obama here: there are many qualifications that aren’t often made with respect to Obama’s race (especially the obvious, that he’s half white as well), but it is pretty difficult to imagine an openly half-Jewish president of Germany in the time directly preceding (or during) the Holocaust, and it is impossible to imagine a half-Armenian president of Turkey during that genocidal process.
I was very interested by your phrase “The US was not held accountable for their discrimination of blacks,” and I think you’re right. However, there’s an important discussion to have about what it means to hold a nation (or is it culture?) “accountable” for discrimination or for genocide. Do you just apply the term retroactively and hope that the stigma comes with enough shame to constitute the whole punishment? Or is it better to heavy-handedly change the guilty institutions? There are two pertinent examples here, one of which we have studied. In terms of holding a culture/country accountable, the continued denials of genocide by Turkey’s government reveal several difficulties here – there’s no self-interested impetus to admit genocide, and the people directly responsible aren’t exactly the same as the people who would be taking the blame. As for the success of heavy-handedly changing institutions, we’ve already tried this ourselves during Reconstruction; it required incredible military force (and was thus unsustainable) and ingrained people’s hatreds more than it changed their minds. (This makes me think about Reid’s comment on my post last time, which wondered whether the only way to change a genocidal society was through cultural genocide.)
While we’re on the Civil War, I think that slavery as a hereditary institution, the way it existed in the US, is an incredibly interesting topic that we haven’t covered. Is it worse if you try to eliminate a whole group (genocide) than if you effectively keep them under lock and key, and profit off of their work without sharing the spoils more than it takes to keep them alive (obviously a huge break with genocide’s fundamental definition, outside of the cultural sense) and keep profiting? The answer isn’t immediately obvious, at least to me. I think the argument for American genocide towards African-Americans today is substantially harder to make than the case that African-American slavery in the US was genocide, or something very close.
Full disclosure, I felt like I had to write about this because I went to one of those specialized NYC high schools as well. Demographically, mine was really interesting: it’s 1% African-American, 3% Hispanic, 24% white, and 72% Asian. Which, obviously, doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics, so your post really caught my attention. I think that the way that test, but more important the entire educational process leading up to that test, is unintentionally (and in some cases intentionally) skewed against certain racial minorities in a systematic way that is hurtful not only to their chances – obviously – but also limits the education of the students that do end up going to those schools regardless of racial group.
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