Notes on the Broken Racist Covenant

Notes on the Broken Racist Covenant

(What Happens When God No Longer Needs White People)

OR

North American Zionism and the Roots of White Panic and Apartheid in Arizona

By George Hartley, Associate Professor of English at Ohio University
December 2, 2010
Last modified December 18, 2010


The current wave of violence and hatred perpetrated by white people against brown people should not be seen as an aberration but rather as a long-standing North American tradition. While Arizona’s first wave of European invaders framed their conquest in terms made available by Spanish Renaissance Catholicism (complete with expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Spain), the Anglo Conquest of the mid-1800s was framed in terms provided by English Puritanism and its transformations under the concept of Manifest Destiny.




It is important, then, to recognize that proponents of Raza and Ethnic Studies are confronted by an ideology of conquest with a 500-year tradition that has been normalized as “the American Way.” At a time when white people are panicking over the continuing browning of the United States and the construction of new brown enemies after the September 11 attacks on the primary symbols of white ascendency—Twin Tower monuments to capitalism and the Pentagon monument to militarism—Ethnic Studies becomes an easy and welcome target for Anglo-Americans desiring scapegoats.


In my attempts to sort out the motivations behind the current expressions of North American Nativism, I continue to try to construct a genealogy of white supremacist ideology or, more accurately, ideologies in the plural. The common thread behind all of these ideological manifestations of racism is the belief that white people are God’s Chosen People. And it is the duty of God’s people to cleanse and purify God’s earth—or at least that portion of God’s earth which for the past few hundred years has been defined as the Nation.


The key ancestral root of this ideological complex is the Abrahamic Covenant and the subsequent Canaanite Genocide. In Deuteronomy 20 verses 16-18 (King James Version) we read:
16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God.
This Biblical injunction from God to His presumed Chosen People to commit genocide against indigenous peoples in the Promised Land gives rise to the dominant Settler-Colonial model of Apartheid, whether in Nazi Germany, South Africa, Palestine, or the U.S.


Big Outline of Ideological Moments in the Construction of Apartheid

• The conversion of the Near-Eastern sun gods into Jesus the son of God.
• The establishment of the New Jerusalem or New Israel or New Zion in North America as the conversion of the Abrahamic Covenant into an American Covenant.
• The function of the national borders after 1848 as the ideological containment of whiteness.
• The 19th-century German indigenous attempts to construct an Aryan Christ in order to separate Christianity from its Jewish roots.
• Anti-Catholic Nativism from Northern Europe to the Ku Klux Klan.
• The turn by Nazis in Germany and Zionists in Palestine to the Anglo-American model of Ethnic Cleansing.
• The continuing war between Spanish and Anglo conquests.

The problem for the white-supremacist imagination today is that God no longer needs white people in order to dominate the globe. Global Capitalism in its neoliberal phase can transcend borders—both national and racial borders—in order to maximize exploitation of labor and resources. But capitalism still needs a grass-roots racist policing of the border in order to maintain a steady supply of surplus super-exploitation of immigrant labor both as a way of continuing to dominate Mexico while using the racist construct of the Mexican to keep white labor in line.


In other words, the less God needs white people for the maintenance of capitalist expansion around the globe, the more God appears—at least in the construction of the beleaguered white-supremacist imagination—to need white people to purify the Nation within and to police its borders from invasion by outsiders. In a time when a Black man sits in the White House carrying out the global designs of capitalism, the current favorite inside outsiders are Muslims and Mexicans. So people like Russell Pearce, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio, and J. T. Ready—and their official and unofficial border guards and Minutemen—need to fan the flames of white panic by attacking the structures of Brown Pride and indigenous resurgence.


You can’t have continued tax cuts for the ultra rich and continued wars against brown peoples around the globe without divide-and-conquer strategies like SB 1080 and HB 2281. For when the God of Capitalism no longer needs white people, the God of Nativism needs them all the more.


RESOURCES:

• Justin Akers and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Haymarket Books, 2006.
• Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny, Bison, 2008.
• Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, Fulcrum, 2008.
• Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, Random House, 1997.
• Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, Vintage, 1992 [1979].
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead, Penguin, 1992 [1991].
• David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, Oxford UP, 1991.