On victory or defeat

In "The New York Review of Books," (which is still printed in a charming and fatass 10½ x 14½ format) Nicole Eustace raises important questions about history-telling in her review of Pekka Hämäläinen’s nonfiction book, "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America."

Hämäläinen’s account of "How the West was won" is reportedly an attempted pendulum swing beyond the simple deconstruction of "Manifest Destiny" and all the violence it required; it is instead a deconstruction of the prevailing narrative that the history of the American Indians is one strictly of loss and suffering. Rather than retelling stories of bloodshed and defeat, Hämäläinen tells stories of bloodshed and victory. He speaks of battles, of evenly-matched skirmishes, and of English colonists "curbed by Indigenous power."

Some of this narrative work, Eustace argues, is successful, but in whole, there's a misalignment:

"[In] the effort to valorize Native peoples and offer an 'epic' narrative of their resistance and endurance, [Hämäläinen] sometimes inadvertently minimizes Indigenous suffering."

I'm sympathetic to recent attempts within minority communities to reclaim their own narratives to more deliberately spotlight victory, resistance, success, and joy. We see this with Black filmmaking that shuns the violence of slavery in favor of, for instance, turbulent and affirming intimacy ("Moonlight"), motherly success within a nuclear family ("Love and Basketball"), and even the consequences of trauma while refusing to glorify that trauma ("Nickel Boys"). There's also a big conversation in San Francisco about whether a 1930s mural that, progressive for its time, has perhaps reduced American Indian identity to that of a prop corpse.

But the bigger question I struggle with is: How do we move beyond the violence acted against us?

And I struggle with this question because I honestly believe I have arrived at an answer and it's an answer I don't like, which is: We don't, at least not in America.

America's number one social currency is loss. Loss is the great validator and loss grants us access to spaces we would not otherwise enter. Loss literally places families into the gallery during every single President's State of the Union address. Loss is the focus of college admissions essays, it is the erector of memorials, it is the first required ingredient for justice. Truly, think about how our entire legal system is built on a punitive approach to loss—a person hurt someone else and therefor we hurt that person in return, either through imprisonment, solitary confinement, the removal of rights, or, in extreme cases, death.

What's particularly interesting to watch is that, as minority communities try to recenter the triumphs of their history in this country, many White Americans are trying to do what they believe is the same—fighting to keep Confederate monuments in tact, attacking school curriculums that factually describe the nation's atrocities, and erasing the contributions of non-White individuals to America's success. This is loser shit, and we shouldn't mistake it for anything else, but there is a danger in painting all White resentment the same, because there have been legitimate and painful losses to all Americans in the past 20 or 30 years, and ignoring that loss amongst White families only makes matters worse.

Which brings me to my Great Unifying Theory on White Identity, which is that White people struggle to define themselves today because, for generations, they learned about non-White injustices (often at the hands of Whites), but they did not feel they had injustices of their own to warrant a collective identity. Even though White privilege is real, the death of manufacturing in the United States 100% destroyed entire cities that were populated almost entirely with White families (I legitimately implore folks to watch just two minutes of this tour of Welch, West Virginia and not see the landscape for what it is—ruins).

Discounting those losses has only metastasized White resentment into White reactionary voting patterns. For an uncomfortable number of White Americans today, "wanting to go back" to a different time does include a more rigid patriarchy, a less independent standing for women, fewer rights for all non-White, non-cis, non-hetero people, and a disgusting un-punishable cruelty against minorities of all kinds, but it also includes something far simpler, which is a fucking paycheck. You can't call a poor man lucky and expect him to back you.

Obviously, we shouldn't kowtow to these antisocial urges, and any voter bloc built on reactionary non-principles is destined to fail (at least I hope), but we should at least be honest in our assessment of what's happening around us.