Restless Natives

Grainy black and white.  Black and white.  Old movies.  Old lies.  And I wonder...   Take away the presumptions of history, turn the world upside down, the flat earth seen in the mirror.  The ships come, for they will surely come.  But the ships come from the south, crowded not with slaves but colonists, who crash like waves upon the shores and multiplying over decades, an increasing storm.  The centuries, with their eventuality, will justify the sins of the invader, the crimes that time cannot efface, the emptied land.  And someday, when technology allows, a dark-skinned director with bleached actors (wearing quaint costumes that suggest but do not remember a lost culture) will create a celluloid reality that will rewrite these first encounters, that called from the comfortable distance of history "contact".  And how might such a fanciful depiction of the days of exploration, invasion, conversion look to the novice audience--white faces huddled in the second balcony--in the flickering insistence of the Bijou's lights?  Most specifically (recalling the dismissive hiss of this world's vision of "witch doctors" and "cannibals"), how would that black and white movie describe the actual cannibalistic theology of the local faith?  How might it mock the fat bishop in his silly miter, the bizarre tone scape of the Gregorian chant, the rites and rituals of birth and marriage and the incoherent spell mumbled over the dying and again over the grave?  Perhaps this picture would be naive and "not malicious", based on the distortions that had formed in the pages of books and newspaper accounts designed to fire the imagination of the folks that were left at home.  Or perhaps the robes and rosaries would be utilized in a wise-cracking, Busby Berkeley number, in which the restless natives would spin and swoon, the sinfully delicious licorice ingenue at the center of it all like the sun in an alien (and dangerous?) landscape inhabited by pallid monsters who pray to a corpse. 

The prejudices are going underground.  Like the poems and prayers of pagan faiths forced by barbarous Christians into hiding, they will be contorted into palatable shapes and warped into superstitions that regardless of courage will seep between the cracks in our "scientific" culture.  Such things do not pass away by edict.  The civil battle frames public discussion and the legal fabric of rights and obligations, but it cannot persuade the hidden demons that dwell in hearts and minds.  For proof of this, examine the public enthusiasm for Obama against the bizarre backdrop of private, unfounded fears.  The legitimacy of the Obama presidency suffers none of the material evidence against it that was obvious as regards the Bush administration.  Nevertheless, it is Obama not Bush that conjures up the bogey men of rumor and lies.  With bigotry still hiding in their cuffs and seams, "good" people easily believe crazy things and do so largely informed by cultural tolerance that makes them blind to the elementary racism that effects them.  They "know", and even "believe" in equality but--like lingering pagan rituals co-opted by the new Christian plurality--the old world view holds on (in shadows) and poisons their perceptions and their communion wine.

There is only about two or three steps between "white man's burden" and "white male privilege," and as antagonists in the larger construction of human tribal instincts, these willful distortions of intent and meaning manage to sell you isolation (of self or of your fellow travelers) or justified anger and conflict. Both exaggerated mirrors, the two sides are locked together. Their mutuality is insured by their meanings. The second is born of the first which should indicate a level of linkage and dependence that will forever inform a dialogue based on these terms. Thus to move the subject of race and all of its assumptions, a new vocabulary must be agreed on that neither denies nor stays stuck in the past.