I sometimes find interesting photos when I'm antiquing, photos that throw me into a mood of anti-nostalgia.
I have one in my upstairs hallway that seems to be the entire labor force of a factory or foundry. It includes men in suits and bowler hats, men and small boys in overalls or work pants and suspenders, with soft caps, women in dresses with high collars and hair pulled up. The class differences are stark, compelling. I’m told it is from Akron, c 1901. It reminds me that labor issues don’t go away.
Another is from a church rally day celebration, some 200 people gathered on a church lawn and steps, dressed in finery, from infants to elders. Three children in the front hold a banner that says “Rally Day” (which is how I knew), and further along, pairs of children hold now-faded banners that read “loyalty” and “service.” This pic has no date, and it’s hard to guess. But there’s a guy in a Navy uniform that looks like WWI. So, maybe that. The thing that struck me was that in this crowd of white middle-America churchgoers, there are two people — a young man and a child — who appear to be in some sort of ethnic dress, he in a full-length tunic and skullcap, and wearing a thin, shoulder-length braid; the child (gender unknown) in layered tunics, perhaps embroidered, their head also wrapped, and wearing a much longer and thicker braid than the man. I wondered if they were guests from a “missions” country the church was involved with, or there for some other less feel-good reason. I wondered, in fact, if they were perhaps not there by choice. Anti-nostalgia.
In the news this week was a story about the remains of 215 indigenous children found in a mass grave in Canada, more victims of white colonization, stolen from families and banished to residential “schools” run by white churches. To be civilized, which is to say “whitened.” Part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, genocide. Not unlike what we have done here overtly and covertly.
Things begin to accumulate, in my mind, on my shoulders. I’d read the Chomsky/Waterstone book last week, The Consequences of Capitalism, a maddeningly educational book about America’s own history from colonists to colonizers, and I learned that the American revolution was as much about Britain’s distaste for slavery and refusal to allow the colonists to expand into Indian territory west of Appalachia as it was about taxes and teas. Why Britain had such principles was confusing, given that country’s own history of empire and colonization. (India, Ireland, Australia, South Asia, Africa…. It’s a long list, including the American colonies.)
After a quick read of Black Fatigue, by Mary-Frances Winters, an important survey of the generational stresses that Black people experience in America, I began this week's book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi (because I clearly need to learn some things). Just 60 pages in, still in the 1930s, I’m overwhelmed by the colonialism of white people and the colonization of Arabs and Muslims by white Christians. The diary of Zionist Theodor Herzl in 1895, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the League of Nations, and other organizations and manifestos, all lining out the century-old intent to drive Palestinians from Palestine and create a Jewish state, then the power of Britain to pave the way before WWII and the power of the US to complete the project after the war, have led us to the state we are in these days — hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced or killed, or living in the “world’s largest open air prison” in Gaza, unwanted around the world, unacknowledged here and elsewhere.
When Israel bombed Gaza those few days last month, more than 200 people died, fully a third of them children. And I hear in my head the theme question of our Michigan Conference Annual Meeting of 2019 — How are the children? The answer is “not good.” Not necessarily even alive.
Palestinian children in Gaza and elsewhere; Black and brown kids in America and elsewhere. Native Americans, fighting once again for their tribes' survival this week in Minnesota, fighting to have land treaties honored when energy companies have other ideas (specifically Enbridge, the folks with the pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac). Mass graves of children in Canada are surely metaphorical, yes?
The child in my vintage photograph. Was she/he there voluntarily? or stolen from their parents for some god-awful “christian” purpose? I have no conclusions today, but here are two takeaways for me from all these threads that come together.
First is the growing discomfort, the broad awareness re-confirmed, to realize how deeply I’m aligned with power. By virtue of race, religion, American citizenship, I am part of a very large and long-standing human rights problem.
But the other thing was more specific and perhaps more unsettling: I have long taught the biblical party line about Israel and the land, the “promised land” pledged by God to Israel. I’ve said this as if I could somehow separate Israel then and Israel now — biblical Israelites from modern Israelis. (Or as if I could expect hearers to make the unspoken distinction.) To be clear, Jews and Palestinians are both our neighbors with whom we share a world and for whom we bear neighborly responsibility. But, I have been forced to wonder, how often does my teaching the ancient stories reinforce Israel’s perceived contemporary “right” to the land — and the subtext of Palestinians’ obligation to give it up?
I have thinking to do, and things to learn and re-learn, and perhaps a lot for which to atone. A lifetime of answers to question. An entire biblical narrative to reconsider.