Oregon is about guns, right-wing media and state violence as well as race. But it shows our racial inequity clearly.
By
Chauncey DeVega
I recently wrote two pieces on white privilege and the occupation of
federal property in Oregon by a gun-toting terrorist insurrectionist
“militia” that is led by the sons of Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher
who, with the aid of an armed group of anti-government protesters, stood
down federal authorities in 2014 because
he did not want to pay his back taxes and grazing fees.
Ammon Bundy speaking at a
forum hosted by the American Academy for Constitutional Education
(AAFCE) at the Burke Basic School in Mesa, Arizona.
Photo
Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America
(Ammon Bundy) [CC BY-SA 2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Those two works—one that was quite short and posted on
my Facebook page; the other a longer piece
featured on
Salon—have been shared and commented upon hundreds of thousands of
times on social media and elsewhere. When an essay on race (especially
when it explores questions surrounding white privilege) goes “viral”
there is a predictable range of reactions.
Some readers have
responded with rage and anger because to discuss the connection between
white privilege, state violence, guns and right-wing politics is
verboten to them.
Other readers have been very positive and
supportive. As was seen online at “Black Twitter,” many people were
quick, and quite correct, to point out the hypocrisy regarding how the
United States government and its agents are apparently much more likely
to use violence against people of color (and especially Muslims in the
post 9/11 era) than they are white Americans. With that observation, a
powerful example was summoned: Tamir Rice, a black child playing with a
toy gun was summarily executed by the Cleveland police; white people can
brandish real guns and point them at the police and federal
authorities, yet somehow they manage to (for the most part) survive
unharmed.
There were other readers who are plugged into the
right-wing conspiracy theory/Fox News/Alex Jones echo chamber. Epistemic
closure visits ignorance and disinformation upon those who are
self-exiled within the right-wing media. These readers defended the
Oregon “militia” brigands with claims that the latter are “freedom
fighters” who are standing up against “tyranny”–as opposed to the plain
fact that they are insurrectionists protecting poachers.
Among the
many thousands of comments (and several emails that I have also
received), there were a few that offered a reasonable and insightful
intervention. Several folks are concerned that the white Oregon “Bundy
Brigands” insurrection is 1.) about “more than race,” and 2.) that
somehow a discussion of the color line and white privilege is a
distraction from “the bigger picture.”
To the second point, my
response is that to critically interrogate matters of race and the color
line is to better understand almost every aspect of American life and
culture. The color line cannot be decoupled from American society. To
run away from this fact is ironically to cede the centrality of race to
America’s history and present. In practice, ignorant and willful
“colorblindness” is a malignant and perverse type of “color
consciousness” that too often enables white supremacy in the post-civil
rights era.
To the first point, are the events in Oregon about
“more than race?” Absolutely! Bundy’s Brigands are a nexus for many
other important matters of public concern in American society.
The
Oregon insurrection is an example of how the right-wing media has
cultivated a culture of anger, aggrievement, anti-government conspiracy
theories, and victimology among its consumers. The idea that publicly
held land is a form of tyranny is absurd. However, the right-wing media
and the Republican Party are part of a political religion which holds
that the government is always the enemy, a baby to be drowned in the
bathtub, as opposed to a force for potential good. Sarah Palin’s death
panels, claims that the Affordable Care Act is akin to “slavery,” the
foolishness of a “War on Christmas,” and the dunder headed political
opportunism of the Benghazi witch hunts, are part of the same distorted
and conspiranoid right-wing political imagination that excreted the
Oregon militia standoff.
In all, there is something profoundly
wrong with America’s sense of civic virtue and righteousness when some
would hesitate to call Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Black Lives Matter
activists freedom fighters, but those same people enthusiastically
embrace using such language to describe right-wing militias and
anti-government activists who want to suck off the public teat while
avoiding paying any taxes or fees to do so.
The right-wing media
protects and nurtures the likes of Cliven Bundy, his sons, and the
broader militia movement by giving them attention and using honorifics,
i.e. the word “patriots,” to describe their treasonous behavior.
Bundy’s
Brigands are also white men with guns. White ammosexual identity is
nurtured and protected by the National Rifle Association, the Republican
Party, and the right-wing media.
These gun-obsessed civic deviants are
described by the right-wing, and unfortunately also the so-called
liberal media, as being members of a “militia” when in reality they are
rabble who are engaging in armed insurrection against a democratically
elected government. The gun industry encourages the armed cowboy cosplay
of groups such as Bundy’s Brigands in Oregon by marketing assault
rifles and other weaponry with allusions to “freedom,” “democracy,” the
myth of the American frontier and the Revolutionary War.
Bundy’s
Brigands are also an example of how certain economic interests are
protected in America. If this group of terrorist insurrectionists had
staged their “standoff” at Wall Street for example, they would have been
beaten up, arrested, and disappeared by the police, private security
forces, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The rhetoric of
capitalism and the iconic and empty Americana images of the yeoman
farmer and cowboy are also operative in the “Oregon Standoff” as well.
If Bundy’s Brigands were liberals and progressives demanding a fairer
and more equal democracy, forming grange associations, or people’s
economic collectives and banks, the reaction by the United States
government and the corporate news media would be very, very, different.
As was seen with Occupy Wall Street, the surveillance and punishing
state would infiltrate and try to destroy the movement. The corporate
news media would legitimate this anti-democratic behavior by slurring
and defaming the activists and other social change workers who are
involved with it.
Moreover, the efforts by militias, as well as
those of individuals such as Cliven Bundy and his sons to privatize
public land, cannot be separated from how corporations and other
interests would like access to those areas. Neoliberalism considers the
very notion of “the commons” and “the public” to be anathema to an
organizing logic where all things are to be privatized, sold off to
corporations, in exclusive service to the plutocrats, and where the
working classes and poor are deemed useless eaters. Bundy’s Brigands and
other right-wing militia groups speak of “freedom” from “tyranny,” but
in reality they are unwittingly (or perhaps, in some cases,
intentionally) working to replace an ostensibly elected and free
American government with an unelected corporate dictatorship.
The
Oregon insurrection is a great opportunity to participate in the too oft
used “teachable moment.” History, as it always does, should inform our
analysis of current events. This leads us to a necessary empirical
question, one that can be answered, and likely has already been, by
social scientists and historians. How does the American State respond to
protest behavior by different racial groups? How are the events in
Oregon similar or different from how the Philadelphia police decided to
firebomb the
headquarters of the African-American radical organization known as
MOVE during the mid-1980's? Are the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco
outliers for how the state uses violence against non-whites, exceptions
that prove the rule? What of the freedom struggle by First Nations
peoples in the
American Indian Movement in the 1960's and 1970's?
Is
the United States government (and its agents) more likely to use
violent force against black and brown people as compared to whites?
While both my intuition and the evidence would seem to suggest “yes,”
this is not an “unknown unknown”–to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld–the
answer is something that can actually be determined.
Bundy’s
Brigands benefit from several types of privilege, with white privilege
being central among them. But, white privilege is only one dimension of a
bigger system of power relationships in the United States and West. We
ought to look broadly for answers while also being mindful of the
specific details and aspects of what is being studied. Bundy’s Brigands
are not a Rosetta Stone for American politics. They can however, help us
to better understand its dynamics.
