12 RACIST RULE, THEN AND NOW
There is a horrific side to American history, seldom acknowledged and rarely taught. It has to do with the countless murderous assaults perpetrated against Native Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, immigrants, and other ethnic minorities. The period between 1835 and 1848, for instance, saw a series of aggressive incursions and then a war waged against Mexico, resulting in the U.S. takeover of approximately half of Mexico—what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, a slice of Colorado, and all of California. In the decades after 1848, 473 out of every 100,000 Mexicans in the Southwest were victims of lynchings. As Luis Angel Toro of the University of Dayton put it, “The Anglos who poured into Texas and the rest of the Southwest brought their apparatus of racial terror, developed to hold the African American people in bondage, to the newly conquered territories. Mexicans became frequent victims of beatings and lynching.”1
There are other examples of ethnic violence almost too grim to contemplate: the four hundred years of massacres and land grabs inflicted upon indigenous Americans (“Indians”), which included the extermination of entire tribes, and the centuries of slavery inflicted upon African Americans, followed by a century of segregation. African Americans compose the ethnic group that has been most persistently assaulted by Caucasian lynch-mob violence, extending from the earliest colonial days right into the second half of the twentieth century. Let us give that terrible issue some attention (since the history textbooks seldom do), focusing on New Orleans and a few other locales at the turn of the century.
In 1900 Ida Wells-Barnett, an African-American woman of no small courage, wrote a vivid exposé of the mob atrocities that were being perpetrated against members of her race in New Orleans. To read her reports today is to peer directly into an ugly and horrific history.2 The scenes she describes in succinct but telling detail were replicated throughout the South and in some parts of the North. To pick one of many incidents, we read that in 1899 in Maysville, Kentucky, a Black man named William Coleman—against whom there was absolutely no evidence of any crime—was slowly roasted to death by an eager crowd, “first one foot and then the other, and dragged out of the fire so that the torture might be prolonged.” Describing several other autos-da-fé, Wells-Barnett remarks with bitter irony that the “ordinary procedures of hanging and shooting have been improved upon during the past ten years.” Sometimes thousands of people congregated to witness the burnings.
She also provides descriptions of the more “ordinary” lynchings, shootings, and mob beatings. In most of these incidents the police either proved unable or unwilling to maintain order; occasionally they even contributed to the disorder. The hideous descriptions of racist mob madness are enough to make one ask what manner of species are humans that they would inflict such horrors upon other living beings.
If Wells-Barnett focuses on a central character, it is Robert Charles, an African American whose only crime was to resist a police beating, flee, and then fight for his life in successive gun battles. Charles was branded a “desperado” and “archfiend,” capable of “diabolical coolness” in his ability to shoot back with deadly accuracy at those who tried to hunt him down. He was repeatedly described as a hardened criminal, even though he had no criminal record and seems never to have committed a crime.
Charles made a desperate last stand, single-handedly, in a small building encircled by a furious armed mob numbering in the thousands. Even as the besiegers set fire to the building, he continued exchanging gunfire with his assailants, killing five attackers and seriously wounding nine others. Finally, Wells-Barnett reports, when fire and smoke became too much to endure, Charles “appeared in the door, rifle in hand, to charge the countless guns that were drawn upon him. With a courage which was indescribable, he raised his gun to fire again, but this time it failed, for a hundred shots riddled his body and he fell dead, face fronting the mob.”
In a posthumous examination of his personal effects, the police found that Charles possessed “negro periodicals and other ‘race’ propaganda.” He was what we would today call a Black Nationalist, active in the back-to-Africa movement. Instantly he devolved from a fiendish criminal to something even worse, an “agitator” and “fanatic,” a Black militant given to “wild tirades.” The literature he possessed was denounced because it “attacked the White race in unstinted language and asserted the equal rights of the Negro,” one report said.
“The equal rights of the Negro”—a long vicious war was being waged against that notion. For several decades before the New Orleans riots, racist violence had rampaged throughout the South, sometimes directed rather precisely against the remnants of Reconstruction. Instigated and led by big planters, mill owners, the railroads, and White supremacists, these racist forces were determined to shatter the coalitions of abolitionists, Republicans, and Populists whose ranks consisted mostly of African Americans and some poor White farmers and small businesspeople.3 Racist supremacy was enlisted to “keep the South safe for the White race”—which usually meant safe for the White moneyed and landed interests, a point the more impoverished lynch mob participants never seemed able to grasp.
A complicit role in the tragic events of 1900 in New Orleans was played by the White-owned press. Some of the 1900 news reports do actually offer an occasionally critical comment about the horrors perpetrated against innocent hardworking African Americans. But for the most part, the press went about its business of blaming the victims, glorifying the police, and demonizing those who fought back.
What does this sordid racist history tell us about the present? In the 1970s during a Senate committee hearing, I heard South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond impatiently exclaim, “No one’s made more progress in this country than the Nigra people.” He was not really praising African Americans for the way they had struggled upward against all odds. If anything, he was voicing his annoyance at their not being grateful for all the improvements they already enjoyed. His message was: count your blessings, you’ve come a long way, stop being ingrates and stop griping.
In reaction to the likes of Thurmond, there are some who would claim that nothing has changed, that things today for African Americans are just as bad as they were under slavery and just as bad as during the post-Reconstruction days described by Wells-Barnett when racist mob rule was the order of the day and any Black was fair game. Since the gains won by minorities are used by racists like Thurmond as an excuse to thwart further progress, the understandable reaction of some militants is to deny that real gains have been won, and to aver that improvements can be found more in the window dressing than in the substance of things; that for every African American appointed to a high profile post in government or wherever, there are dozens of less fortunate and less visible ones being roughed up by police on streets or in jail cells, sometimes with fatal results.
But to argue that no meaningful progress has been made is to claim that history is exclusively in the hands of oppressors who are more or less omnipotent. In fact, one has to argue both sides of the street on this, in a seemingly back-and-forth manner.
First, it is important to realize that vital democratic gains have been achieved by the champions of civil rights. With incredible courage and persistence, African Americans along with some Whites have fought back and made gains against lynch-mob terrorism, segregation, sharecropper servitude, disenfranchisement, job and housing discrimination, police brutality, and every other kind of institutionalized racism.
Second, having said that advances have been made, we need to remain alert to the terrible ethno-class inequalities and oppressions that still persist within U.S. society, and the concerted assault being perpetrated by reactionaries upon the gains won by all working and middle-class people over the past century, an assault that has cost the African-American community dearly in rollbacks and cutbacks.
So we go back and forth on this issue because sometimes the gains seem important and substantive, and sometimes they indeed seem like mere tokenism or under threat of being obliterated. Old oppressions have a way of reappearing in modern dress, even if not quite as viciously and blatantly as in bygone times. When Wells-Barnett wrote in 1900, “It is now, even as it was in the days of slavery, an unpardonable sin for a Negro to resist a White man no matter how unjust or unprovoked the White man’s attack may be,” we might say that this still can be the case in certain situations and locales—especially if the White man is dressed in a blue uniform and wears a badge. Nowadays, too often the police commit the racist murders and beatings that the untrammeled mob used to perpetrate.4
Just recently, in 2005, two New Orleans police beat an unarmed 64-year-old African-American man, a retired school teacher who had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, an incident that leaves one with the feeling that indeed not much has changed. But we then have to reverse field and point out that the two cops were fired and charged with criminal battery.5 In 1900, in contrast, disciplinary and legal action against police for such a crime would have been unimaginable. In fact, the police assault would probably not have even been perceived as a crime by New Orleans authorities.
It should be added that even today these officers were disciplined not because the authorities took it upon themselves to be fair-minded and tougher toward racist White cops. The officials acted because of the spotlight that was brought to bear on the incident and the pressure put upon the New Orleans police department by organized civil rights groups. And such pressure emerged and was effective because of the century of struggle against racism and the resultantly stronger egalitarian climate of opinion that obtains today.
The ruling interests of yesteryear used racism much as they do today. Racism is a way of directing the anger of exploited Whites toward irrelevant enemies, making them feel victimized by African Americans who supposedly are expecting and getting special (equal) treatment. Racism blurs and buries economic grievances. Whites are less likely to act against their bosses, being themselves too busy trying to keep African Americans down. Thus the working populace is divided against itself, making it difficult for White and Black workers to act in unison against the moneyed class.
Racism also depresses wages for all by creating super-exploited categories of workers (Blacks, women, immigrants) who toil for less because of the very limited employment choices they are accorded.
But just as there can be such a thing as “surplus repression” (overkill that becomes counterproductive in maintaining class control), so there can be such a thing as “surplus racism” which damages the community’s image and limits its economic opportunities. Wells-Barnett mentioned that once the local rich White folks of New Orleans realized that mob violence was hurting investments in the region, they began to stir themselves against the race riots, not for the sake of racial justice but for the purpose of saving the city’s investment credit.
Today, racism remains a handy ruling-class card to play, even while a great show is made of appointing small numbers of (relatively conservative) African Americans and other ethnic minorities to White House cabinet posts and the federal courts. Reactionary leaders cannot get away with openly inciting Caucasians against African Americans. They dare not utter racist epithets today, at least not to public audiences. But they have other buzz words and coded terms: “welfare queens,” “quotas,” “special interests,” “inner-city residents,” “criminal elements,” and the like. So the plutocrats direct the legitimate grievances of the middle Americans toward innocent foes, and in return the middle Americans vote for the plutocrats thinking they are thereby defending their own precarious socio-economic interests. Thus do reactionaries continue to play off White against Black. Divide and rule—it worked back then and still does to some extent today.
All the more reason to look for ways of uniting Caucasian Americans, African Americans, and all people of color in common struggle. The road to racial justice continues to be long and hard, and sometimes it feels as if we are losing our way. Thinking about the ugly side of New Orleans in 1900 gives us a perspective on how bad things were, how bad they can get, how many gains have been made, and how important it is to continue the fight.
13 CUSTOM AGAINST WOMEN
If we uncritically immerse ourselves in the cultural context of any society, seeing it only as it sees itself, then we are embracing the self-serving illusions and hypocrisies it has of itself. Perceiving a society “purely on its own terms” usually means seeing it through the eyes of dominant groups that exercise a preponderant influence in shaping its beliefs and practices.
Furthermore, the dominant culture frequently rests on standards that are not shared by everyone within the society itself. So we come upon a key question: whose culture is it anyway? Too often what passes for the established culture of a society is for the most part the preserve of the privileged, a weapon used against more vulnerable elements.
This is seen no more clearly than in the wrongdoing perpetrated against women. A United Nations report found that prejudice and violence against women “remain firmly rooted in cultures around the world.”6 In many countries, including the United States, women endure discrimination in wages, occupational training, and job promotion. According to a New York Times report, in most of sub-Saharan Africa women cannot inherit or own land—even though they cultivate it and grow 80 percent of the continent’s food.7
It is no secret that women are still denied control over their own reproductive activity. Throughout the world about eighty-million pregnancies a year are thought to be unwanted or ill-timed. And some twenty million unsafe, illegal abortions are performed annually, resulting in the deaths of some 78,000 women yearly, with millions more sustaining serious injury.8 In China and other Asian countries where daughters are seen as a liability, millions of infant females are missing, having been aborted or killed at birth or done in by neglect and underfeeding.9
An estimated hundred million girls in Africa and the Middle East have been genitally mutilated by clitoridectomy (excision of the clitoris) or infibulation (excision of the clitoris, labia minora, and inner walls of the labia majora, with the vulva sewed almost completely shut, allowing an opening about the circumference of a pencil). The purpose of such mutilation is to drastically diminish a woman’s capacity for sexual pleasure, insuring that she remains her husband’s compliant possession. Some girls perish in the excision process (usually performed with no anesthetic, no sterilization procedures, and by an older female with no medical training). Long-term consequences of infibulation include obstructed menstrual flow, chronic infection, hurtful coitus, and complicated childbirth.
In much of the Middle East, women have no right to drive cars or to appear in public unaccompanied by a male relative. They have no right to initiate divorce proceedings but can be divorced at the husband’s will.
In Latin American and Islamic countries, men sometimes go unpunished for defending their “honor” by killing their allegedly unfaithful wives or girlfriends. In fundamentalist Islamic Iran, the law explicitly allows for the execution of adulterous women by stoning, burning, or being thrown off a cliff. In countries such as Bangladesh and India, women are murdered so that husbands can remarry for a better dowry. An average of five women a day are burned in dowry-related disputes in India, and many more cases go unreported.10
In Bihar, India, women found guilty of witchcraft are still burned to death. In modern-day Ghana, there exist prison camps for females accused of being witches. In contrast, male fetish priests in Ghana have free reign with their magic practices. These priests often procure young girls from poor families that are said to owe an ancestral debt to the priest’s forebears. The girls serve as the priests’ sex slaves. The ones who manage to escape are not taken back by their fearful families. To survive, they must either return to the priest’s shrine or go to town and become prostitutes.11
Millions of young females drawn from all parts of the world are pressed into sexual slavery, in what amounts to an estimated $7 billion annual business. More than a million girls and boys, many as young as five and six, are conscripted into prostitution in Asia, and perhaps an equal number in the rest of the world. Pedophiles from the United States and other countries fuel the Asian traffic. Enjoying anonymity and impunity abroad, these “sex tourists” are inclined to treat their acts of child rape as legal and culturally acceptable.12
In Afghanistan under the Taliban, women were captives in their own homes, prohibited from seeking medical attention, working, or going to school. The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was hailed by President Bush Jr. as a liberation of Afghani women. In fact, most of that country remains under the control of warlords and resurgent Taliban fighters who oppose any move toward female emancipation. And the plight of rural women has become yet more desperate. Scores of young women have attempted self-immolation to escape family abuse and unwanted marriages. “During the Taliban we were living in a graveyard, but we were secure,” opined one female activist. “Now women are easy marks for rapists and armed marauders.”13
In Iraq we find a similar pattern: the plight of women actually worsening because of a U.S. invasion. Saddam Hussein’s secular Baath Party created a despotic regime (fully backed by Washington during its most murderous period). But the Baathists did grant Iraqi women rights that were unparalleled in the Gulf region. Women could attend university, travel unaccompanied, and work alongside men in various professions. They could choose whom to marry or could refrain from getting married. With the growing insurgency against the U.S. occupation, however, females are now targeted by the ascendant Islamic extremists. Clerics have imposed new restrictions on them. Women are forced to wear the traditional head covering, and girls spend most of their days indoors confined to domestic chores. Most Iraqi women are now deprived of public education. Often the only thing left to read is the Koran.
Many women fear they will never regain the freedom they enjoyed under the previous regime. As one Iraqi feminist noted, “The condition of women has been deteriorating. . . . This current situation, this fundamentalism, is not even traditional. It is desperate and reactionary.”14
For all the dramatic advances made by women in the United States, they too endure daunting victimization. Tens of thousands of them either turn to prostitution because of economic need or are forced into it by a male exploiter, only to be kept there by acts of violence and intimidation. An estimated three out of four women in the United States are victims of a violent crime sometime during their lifetime. Every day, four women are murdered by men to whom they have been close. Murder is the second leading cause of death among young American women.
In the United States domestic violence is the leading cause of injury among females of reproductive age. An estimated three million women are battered each year by their husbands or male partners, often repeatedly.
Statistically, a woman’s home is her most dangerous place—if she has a man in it. This is true not only in the United States but in a number of other countries.15 Battered women usually lack the financial means to escape, especially if they have children. When they try, their male assailants are likely to come after them and inflict still worse retribution. Police usually are of little help. Arrest is the least frequent response to domestic violence. In most states, domestic beatings are classified as a misdemeanor.16
In most parts of this country, if a man physically attacks another man on the street, leaving him battered and bloody, he can be charged with “felonious assault with intent to inflict serious bodily injury” and he might face five to ten years in the slammer, depending on the circumstances. But when this same man beats up his wife or female domestic partner, a whole different procedure and vocabulary is activated. For some reason the crime is reduced to a therapeutic problem. He is charged with “domestic abuse” and held overnight, if that long. And he has to agree to attend counseling sessions in which he supposedly will see the errors of his ways. If the chronic batterer knew that he would be facing five to ten years in prison, he might be more reliably deterred, as some batterers themselves have admitted.
In contrast, the women who kill their longtime male abusers in desperate acts of self-defense usually end up serving lengthy prison sentences. In recent times, women’s organizations have had some success in providing havens for battered women and pressuring public authorities to move against male violence.
To conclude, those who insist that outsiders show respect for their customs may have a legitimate claim in some historic instances, or they may really be seeking license to continue oppressing the more vulnerable elements within their own society. There is nothing sacred about the status quo, and nothing sacred about culture as such. There may be longstanding practices in any culture, including our own, that are not worthy of respect. And there are basic rights that transcend all cultures, as even governments acknowledge when they outlaw certain horrific practices and sign international accords in support of human rights.17
14 ARE HETEROSEXUALS WORTHY OF MARRIAGE?
During 2003–2004, as heartland America gawked in horrified fascination, thousands of homosexual men married each other, as did thousands of lesbians, in San Francisco and several other obliging locales. A furious outcry was not long in coming from those who claimed to know what side of the Kulturkampf God is on. President Bush Jr. proposed an amendment to the Constitution making same-sex wedlock a federal offense. Heterosexual marriage, he declared, is “the most fundamental institution of civilization.”
According to opinion polls in 2004, a majority of Americans believed that marriage should be strictly a man-woman affair. At least fourteen states had passed laws or amendments to their state constitutions banning gay marriage. Eight of these also outlawed civil unions and domestic partnerships, including heterosexual ones. It has to be man-woman marriage or no bonds at all.
Opponents of same-sex wedlock do not offer a single concrete example of how it would damage society. Gay marriage is legal in Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and the state of Massachusetts, and thus far it has neither impaired traditional marriage nor subverted civil order in those societies. In fact, the mentioned countries have less crime and social pathology than does the United States.
If matrimony really is such a sacred institution, why leave it entirely in the hands of heterosexuals? History gives us countless examples of how heterosexuals have defiled the sanctity of this purportedly God-given institution. A leader of a Michigan group called Citizens for the Protection of Marriage proclaimed that the people in his community supported “the traditional, historical, biblical definition of marriage.”18 But for millennia the traditional historical biblical marriage consisted of a bond not between a man and a woman but between a man and any number of women. Polygamy is an accepted feature in the Holy Bible itself. King Solomon, for instance, had 700 wives, not to mention 300 concubines, yet suffered not the mildest rebuke from either God or man (at least not in the Bible). Polygamy is still practiced secretly and illegally in parts of Utah among dissident Mormon splinter groups and in places like New York where it is estimated that some thousands of male immigrants from Africa have two or more wives under circumstances that prove less than happy for the women. It is seldom prosecuted.19
In some parts of the world today, polygamy is commonly practiced by men who have the money to buy additional wives. Buy? Exactly. Too often heterosexual marriage is not a mutual bonding but a one-sided bondage. The entrapped women have no say in the matter. In various countries, mullahs, warlords, tribal chieftains, or other prestigious or prosperous males lock away as many wives as they can get their hands on. The women often find themselves railroaded into a lifelong loveless captivity, subjected to periodic violence, prolonged isolation, enforced illiteracy, unattended illnesses, and other degrading conditions.
The defenders of straight marriage say little about how their sanctified institution is used in some places as an instrument of child sexual abuse and female enslavement. Girls as young as eleven and twelve are still bartered in various parts of the world, with a nuptial night that brings little more than child rape, often followed by years of mistreatment by the groom and his family.
A longstanding but horrific avenue to heterosexual matrimony is rape. In parts of southern Europe and in fifteen Latin American countries, custom—and sometimes the penal code itself—exonerates a rapist if he offers to make amends by marrying the victim, and she accepts.20 In Costa Rica he is released even if she refuses the offer. Relatives often pressure the victim to accept in order to restore honor to the family and herself. When a woman is gang raped, all the rapists are likely to propose marriage in order to evade imprisonment. “Can you imagine that a woman who has been gang raped will then be pressured to chose which of her attackers she wants to spend the rest of her life with?” comments one disgusted male lawyer in Peru.21 Such laws implicitly condone the crime of rape by making it easily absolved with an opportunistic marriage offer.
Another practice long associated with heterosexual wedlock is its use to cement political alliances, shore up family fortunes, or advance careers. From ancient Rome to the latter-day European aristocracy, females of the best families of one nation or political faction were treated like so many gaming pieces, married off to well-placed males of another nation or faction. And not only among aristocrats. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in respectable bourgeois society the suitability of a prospective spouse was just as often determined by purse and pedigree as by any genuine emotional attachment.
Throughout history marriage has been more closely linked to property than to love, usually to the benefit of the male spouse. For generations, in parts of the United States and other western countries, a married woman could not own property. She had to forfeit her family inheritance to her husband. Arranged marriages continue today in many parts of the world, with little regard for the feelings of the young women and men involved but with much concern for the dowry, social status, and financial condition of the respective families. Even in our own country there are heterosexuals who marry for money, social standing, or some other reason having little to do with personal regard and affection. Do not such opportunistic calculations devalue the institution?
Another dismal chapter in the history of heterosexual wedlock is the way it has been used to bolster racism. In some seventeen states in the United States, holy matrimony was an unholy racist institution, with laws forbidding wedlock between persons of different races. Hence for generations we lived with legally mandated same-race marriage. The last of these miscegenation laws was not removed from the books until 1967.
For millions of women heterosexual marriage is not a particularly uplifting or even safe institution. An estimated two million females in the United States are repeatedly battered; most are married to their attackers. Domestic violence is the single greatest cause of injury and one of the leading causes of death for U.S. women. An uncounted number of wives are raped by abusive husbands. Almost three million U.S. children reportedly are subjected to serious neglect, physical mistreatment, or incest rape by a close family member, usually a father, uncle, stepfather, grandfather, older brother, or mother. Each year tens of thousands of minors run away to escape abusive homes. Taking the sacred vows of holy matrimony is no guarantee against the foulest domestic misdeeds.
Children are as badly mistreated in traditional Christian families as in any other. Conservative religious affiliation is “one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence.”22 Nor do women fare all that well in fundamentalist households. Frequently confined to the traditional roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, they are dependent on their husbands for support and therefore more vulnerable to mistreatment. The fundamentalist clergymen they consult are often inclined to dismiss their complaints and advise them to suffer quietly like good wives as God ordained. Restrictive divorce laws and heartless cutbacks in welfare support make it still more difficult for women with children to leave oppressive and potentially lethal relationships.23
As women gain in education and earning power and become less economically dependent on men, they are less likely to stay in abusive marriages. In fact, they are less inclined to marry. In countries like Japan, about half of the single women from 35 to 54 have no intention of ever marrying, and over 71 percent say they never want children. Women prefer to remain single so they can “continue to maintain a wide spectrum of friends and pursue their careers,” according to one report. The same trend can be observed in Singapore, South Korea, and some other countries. Despite high jobless rates, women are putting their education and careers first, showing no eagerness to submerge themselves in a traditional marriage.24
In the United States marriage is becoming less popular among both men and women. Census Bureau figures show that the number of unmarried men between ages 30 and 34 climbed from 9 to 33 percent over the last several decades. During that time the percentage of out-of-wedlock births more than tripled.25 Again, if marriage is in decline, it is not because gays have been undermining it.
Millions of heterosexual couples in the United States and elsewhere find marriage to be a gratifying experience, if not for a lifetime certainly for some substantial duration. One survey reports that 38 percent of wedded Americans say they are happily married.26 But for most U.S. marriages the predictable outcome is divorce, 51 percent to be exact. Yet society has not unraveled. Perhaps, then, marriage is not the most fundamental institution of civilization, the foundation of society, as Bush Jr. claims. If anything, in the more abusive households divorce is actually a blessing.
Americans are more religious than Europeans, yet they lead the world in single parenthood and divorce. According to a 2001 study by Barna Research Group Ltd., born-again Christians are just as likely to get divorced as less confirmed believers, with almost all their divorces happening “after they accepted Christ, not before.” Jesus worshippers may pray together but they do not necessarily stay together. Census Bureau figures from 2003 show divorce rates are actually higher in areas where conservative Christians live. Bible Belt states like Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, while having the highest divorce rates in the country, roughly twice that of more liberal states like Massachusetts.27
Fundamentalist keepers of public morals do bemoan the high divorce rate, but they don’t rant about it the way they do about gay wedlock. The point is, if straight individuals, such as reactionary radio commentator and admitted substance abuser Rush Limbaugh, can get married and divorced repeatedly without denigrating the institution, what is so threatening about a gay union? Does Limbaugh feel that gay marriage makes a mockery of all three of his past forays into holy matrimony (and subsequent three divorces) and any future marriages he may venture upon? If anything, happy gays wanting to get into the institution might help make up for all those unhappy straights wanting to get out.
Proponents of the sanctity of heterosexual matrimony frequently prove themselves to be among the biggest moral hypocrites afoot. A prime example is Republican congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, a married father of three, and a champion of the right-wing Christian Coalition. Burton had to admit to fathering a child in an extramarital affair. He also used campaign money and federal funds to hire women of dubious credentials. He set one of them up in a house and gave her about $500,000 in payments without making clear what she did to earn so much so quickly.
Another Republican congressman, Henry Hyde of Illinois, a great proponent of “family values,” was found to have carried on an adulterous affair over some years; so too Pennsylvania Republican Don Sherwood, whose extramarital girlfriend accused him in 2006 of physically abusing her. One congressman, Florida Republican Mark Foley, professed a special concern for the well-being of America’s youth but himself was forced to resign from Congress when it was discovered that he had been trolling for young male pages on Capitol Hill, an addiction that Republican House leaders knew about and had covered up for many months.28
While preaching the sanctity of marriage, televangelist Jimmy Swaggert, married with children, was forced to admit that he was regularly patronizing a prostitute. A leading fundamentalist televangelist preacher, Rev. Ted Haggard, close ally to the Bush Jr. White House and head of a 14,000-member megachurch, vehemently denounced gay marriage and homosexuality until it was revealed that for three years he had been paying a male prostitute for monthly sexual encounters.29 I, for one, was shocked and disgusted upon reading this particular news item. It certainly lowered my opinion of male prostitutes.
One could go on. Freethought Today, publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, every month presents two full pages of criminal cases involving scores of clergy and other religious leaders, hypocritical keepers of heterosexual family values, who are charged with sexual assault, rape, statutory rape, sodomy, coerced sex with parishioners and minors, indecent liberties with minors, molestation and sexual abuse of children (of both sexes), marriage or cohabitation with underage girls, financial embezzlement, fraud, theft, and other crimes.
As to whether children can hope to have a proper upbringing with gay parents, a judge in Arkansas ruled affirmatively in 2005. He issued a set of findings showing that children of gay and lesbian households are as well adjusted as other children, having no more academic problems or confusion about gender identity, or difficulties relating to peers, or instances of child abuse. There is no evidence, he concluded, that heterosexual parents are better at dealing with minors than gay parents.30
Untroubled by the absence of evidence, the New York Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that same-sex couples have no right to marry under New York’s constitution. The court ignored the Arkansas decision and the evidence upon which it was based, and fell back on folklore: “For the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability,” and “it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and a father.”31
The major purpose of marriage, argue the religiously orthodox and other homophobes, is the bearing and rearing of children. Male gay couples cannot bear children, and the New York court seemed to think that they are not sufficiently equipped to raise them. But the evidence referenced in the Arkansas case indicates that gay couples are at least as capable of proper parenting as straight couples. Futhermore, are children really the major purpose of marriage? Certainly not for the millions in childless marriages who cannot have children or do not desire children either because they are too old or too poor or just not interested or already have children from previous marriages. Should they too be denied the right to wed?
If same-sex unions do violate church teachings, then the church (or synagogue or mosque) can refuse to perform gay marriages, and many have refused. The gays I saw getting married in San Francisco’s City Hall in 2004 were engaged in civil marriages, with no cleric presiding. And what I saw opened my heart. Here were people, many in longstanding relationships, who were experiencing their humanity, happy at last to have a right to marry the one they loved, happy to exercise their full citizenship and be treated as persons equal under the law. As commented one gay groom, who had been with his mate for seventeen years, “We didn’t know the shame and inequality we’d been living with until we were welcomed into City Hall as equal human beings.”32
But it is not all love and roses with gay wedlock. Less than a year after getting married, a number of same-sex couples filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences,” demonstrating again that gays are not that different from the rest of us.
To sum up, here are some of the things that straight-sex marriage has wrought through the ages: polygamy, child-brides, loveless arrangements, trafficked women, battered wives, bartered wives, raped wives, murdered wives, sexual slavery, incest rape, child neglect and abandonment, racist miscegenation laws, rampant hypocrisy, and astronomical divorce rates. If gays and lesbians are unqualified for marriage, what can we say about straights? The Jesus worshippers who want to prevent holy wedlock from being sullied might begin by taking an honest look at the ugly condition of so many heterosexual unions in this country and throughout the world.
15 THAT’S ITALIAN? ANOTHER ETHNIC STEREOTYPE
The several hundred or so hoodlums in the organized rackets who are of Italian descent compose but a tiny fraction of an Italian-American population estimated at over fifteen million people. Yet with the help of the news and entertainment media and persons in public life, these racketeers have become representative of an entire ethnic group. Linking Italians as an entire group with organized crime has long been one of those respectable forms of bigotry.
Back in 1961, syndicated news columnist John Crosby wrote, “I must point out that the Italians, and particularly the Sicilians, have a knack for hoodlumism and for organized crime out of proportion to most other national groups.”33 A decade later, the Oval Office tapes released during the Watergate investigation revealed President Richard Nixon saying to his assistant John Ehrlichman, “The Italians. We must not forget the Italians. . . . They’re not like us. Difference is . . . they smell different. After all, you can’t blame them. Oh no. Can’t do that. They’ve never had the things we’ve had. . . . Of course, the trouble is . . . you can’t find one that’s honest.”34 Such words from a man who was driven from high office for lying, cheating, and lawbreaking.
Fast forward another dozen years or so to 1983. I am in my hotel room watching the brilliant comedian Richard Pryor doing one of his stand-ups, and suddenly I hear him say: “Not all Italians are in the mafia. They just all work for the mafia.” The audience laughs. More recently in July 2005, on his Prairie Home Companion radio show, Garrison Keillor described the North End of Boston, a predominantly Italian family neighborhood with a relatively low crime rate, as “the place where, if there were such a thing as a mafia, that’s where it would be.” His audience thought this was uproariously funny.
There have been Irish, Jewish, Black, Latino, and even Anglo-Protestant mobsters in our history. Today we see the emergence of Russian and Asian gangsters. None of these cutthroats are representative of the larger ethnic formations from which they happened to emerge. But it is the Italian crime syndicate that has enjoyed a predominance for the last half-century, and upon whom the media have fixed. In the 1950s there was the TV series The Untouchables; today there is The Sopranos, while in the film world it is The Godfather and other movies too numerous to list.
Worse still, the mobsters in these flicks are sometimes depicted in a romanticized way, powerful but admirable family patriarchs who mete out a rough justice, occasionally helping the little guy. Scarce attention is given to how these gangsters actually make their living. One would never guess that they are extortionists, swindlers, drug dealers, numbers racketeers, pimps, and smalltime thieves. They exploit the weak and vulnerable, maybe not as effectively as Enron, Harkin, Halliburton, and WorldCom, but viciously enough.
Just about the only positive feature of The Sopranos is the way it realistically depicts mobsters as ruthless “protection” racketeers who regularly victimize small business people and other hardworking folks. Distinct among mafia films is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. An exceptionally well-made movie based on a true story, Goodfellas divests the mafiosi of any romantic or glorified aura, revealing them to be the vicious bloodsuckers and cutthroats they really are.
Italian Americans themselves avidly watch these mafia shows for the same reason that years ago African Americans watched Amos and Andy, and Jewish Americans watched The Goldbergs. Long starved for acknowledgment from the dominant Anglo- Protestant culture, the ethnics have always looked for signs that they count for something, that they actually exist in the eyes of the wider society. The feeling of being marginalized, a stranger in one’s own land, is part of what makes many ethnics so responsive to any kind of media representation, sometimes even a derogatory one. A starving person will eat foul food.
Before I finally gave up on The Sopranos, I found myself enjoying the arcane Southern Italian slang words and expressions that were slipped into the show’s scripts. Italian dialect terms (some of them not very nice) that I had not heard since my youth in the old neighborhood I now heard on a major media show. It was a source of some satisfaction, an inside joke over America’s airwaves.
Having been fed all these mafia shows, we need to remind ourselves that not all gangsters are Italian and not all Italians are gangsters. As with other ethnic groups in the last half century, Italian Americans have moved in noticeable numbers into government service, political life, sports, law enforcement, education, organized labor, the professions, entertainment, and the arts. But very little of what constitutes non-criminal Italian-American life has been deemed worthy of cinematic treatment. (There have been some worthy exceptions such as the films Marty, Moonstruck, and Dominic and Eugene.)
When Italians actually are portrayed as law-abiding people, it is usually within the framework of working-class stereotypes: action-prone, loud-mouthed, simple-minded, visceral, living a proletarian existence worth escaping (for instance, Saturday Night Fever, Staying Alive, and Hard Hat and Legs). The media’s Italian ethnic bigotry is also a class bigotry.
Additional Italian-American stereotypes can be found in the world of television advertisements, as Marco Ciolli describes it: there is the Latin lover who wins his lady with his right choice of beverage; the Mafia don ready to start a gangland massacre if the lasagna isn’t magnifico; the nearly inarticulate disco dimwit who can barely say “Trident” as he twirls his partners around the dance floor.35
Above all, there are the uproarious family meal scenes of blissfully chattering Italians shoveling food around the table and into their mouths. In the world of commercials, Italians are represented as noisy gluttons feasting with lip-smacking exuberance on endless platters of pasta, volunteering such connoisseur culinary judgments as “Mama mia! datza spicy meatball!,” an expression that served as a running joke for years during the 1970s. The food stereotype has continued to this day. In 2006, a Pizza Hut television commercial featured an elderly Italian couple, dressed in the style of oldtime immigrants just getting off the boat. She exclaims “Oooh, mama mia!” when the pizza appears, and he asks her in a scolding tone, “Why you no make-uh pizza like-uh dat?”36
The stereotypical linking of Italians with food is so predominant as to preclude this ethnic group’s association with other realms of activity (except, of course, crime). Thus a PBS documentary mini-series on the English language, written and narrated by Robert MacNeil (of MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour fame) dwelled at length on how various foreign languages have enriched the English language. However, Italian was something of an exception, MacNeil asserted, since the only Italian words he could find that have passed into English “all relate to food.”
MacNeil should have searched a little more carefully. The food stereotype so preempted his myopic vision as to cause him to overlook such inedibles as: aggiornamento, bravo, bravado, brio, buffo, ghetto, dilettante, cognoscenti, illuminati, literati, virtuoso, crescendo, diminuendo, fresco, divertimento, falsetto, forte, fortissimo, politico, graffiti, piazza, imbroglio, inamorata, incognito, malaria, paparazzi, pietà, prima donna, diva, regatta, rotunda, impresario, piano, soprano, contralto, sotto voce, libretto, maestro, staccato, stiletto, studio, umbrella, viola, vibrato, vendetta, vista—one could go on.
Their days taken up with runs to and from the kitchen, or with shooting people in the face, Italians doubtless are a poor choice when it comes to chairing a board meeting, offering medical advice, writing a cogent social analysis, debating a public policy, arguing a court case, or conducting a scientific experiment. As Ciolli observes, “Certainly no commercial has ever shown an Italian American involved in any professional activity.”37
It has been argued that the media merely reflect reality: after all there actually are Italian gangsters, and Italians really do like to drink wine and eat pasta (as do many other people). But such assertions overlook the distorted dimension of the “reality” presented. More often than not, the media’s approach is to propagate and reinforce the cheap, facile notions about one group or another rather than challenge such views in any measured way.
If the representations can easily be made plausible, amusing, or sensational, then the corporate media will use them. The goal is to manipulate rather than educate, to reach as many people as quickly as possible with prefabricated but readily evocative images. For those on the receiving end, it’s not fun.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Cristobal Cavazos, “Violence against Mexicans: A Neglected Part of Our History,” People’s Weekly World, 17 June 2006; see also Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America, a History of the Chicanos (Longman, 2006).
2. Recently edited and reissued by Marcus Jacobs as: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mob Rule in New Orleans (Propaganda Press, 2006).
3. Scott Marshall, “North Carolina Confronts Shameful History,” People’s Weekly World, 18 March 2006.
4. For some of the many cases of police brutality and murder perpetrated against African Americans in recent times, see Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson, 2007), chapter ten, “Unequal Before the Law.”
5. Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2005.
6. United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population Report 2000.
7. New York Times, 18 June 2004.
8. U.N. Population Fund, State of World Population Report 2000.
9. The disappearance of females is discernible when census data is markedly out of line with normal gender birth rates.
10. Report by the United Nations Department of Public Information DPI/1772/HR—February 1996.
11. This account given to me, 19 October 2004, by Emilie Parry, former researcher in Ghana; also see the documentary film, Witches in Exile (2004).
12. Andrew Cockburn, “21st Century Slavery,” National Geographic, September 2003.
13. Quoted in John Pilger, “Afghanistan—What Good Friends Left Behind,” Guardian (UK), 20 September 2003.
14. Yanar Mohammed quoted in Christian Parenti, The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press, 2004), 24.
15. Elizabeth Rosenthal, “Women Face Greatest Threat of Violence at Home,” New York Times, 6 October 2006; this article summarizes a ten-nation report by the World Health Organization.
16. Maria Roy, The Abusive Partner (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982); Richard Gelles and Murray Straus, Intimate Violence (Simon & Schuster, 1988).
17. For further exploration of cultural themes touched upon in this selection, see Michael Parenti, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories, 2006).
18. Quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, 25 October 2004.
19. Nina Bernstein, “Polygamy, Praticed in Secrecy, Follows Africans to New York,” New York Times, 23 March 2007.
20. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.
21. Quoted in Calvin Sims, “Justice in Peru,” New York Times (international edition), 12 March 1997.
22. See the studies by sociologists and social psychologists cited in Kimberly Blaker, “God’s Warrior Twins,” Toward Freedom, Fall 2003.
23. Blaker, “God’s Warrior Twins”; see also Kimberly Blaker (ed.) The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (New Boston Books, 2003).
24. Jane Ganahl, “Women in Asia Are Starting to Say ‘I Don’t,’” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 November 2004.
25. U.S. Census Bureau report, Associated Press, 2 December 2004.
26. As reported in Mother Jones, January/February 2005.
27. New York Times, 20 November 2004.
28. Russ Baker, “The House Flunks Ethics,” Nation, 15 February 1999; Dennis Bernstein and Leslie Kean, Henry Hyde’s Moral Universe (Common Courage, 1999); Washington Post, 29 September to 5 October 2006.
29. New York Times, 3 to 5 November 2006.
30. San Francisco Chronicle, 1 January 2005.
31. New York Law Journal, 7 July 2006.
32. Quoted in Chris Thompson, “Gay Couples Aren’t Inclined to Apologize,” East Bay Express, 10-16 November 2004.
33. Crosby’s column appeared in various newspapers on 22 March 1961; quoted in Richard Gambino, “Living with the Mark of Cain,” I Am, August 1977.
34. Quoted in Garry Wills, “Nixon, Italian Style,” La Parola dal Popolo, March/April 1975.
35. Marco Ciolli, “Exploiting the Italian Image,” Attenzione, September 1979.
36. ABC-TV, Bay Area, California, 5 September 2006.
37. Ciolli, “Exploiting the Italian Image.”