Cascade Mountain
I had heard of "John Brown's Body" before and had a vague sense of what it was — the original version of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," a song we were forced to sing in elementary school music class. But it never occurred to me to wonder where John Brown's actual body was buried until recently, when I drove past a sign about it on the way to go on a hike in the Adirondacks, to the top of Cascade Mountain.
Down a short dead-end road near Lake Placid, alongside the U.S. Olympic team's ski-jumping facilities, was John Brown's farm. The road terminated in a circle, at the center of which was a monumental and somewhat paternalistic statue by Joseph Pollia of Brown befriending a black boy. (Pollia apparently took no "sides" when it comes to Civil War–era monuments; he also made the equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson at Manassas.) Beyond the edge of the circle, behind a wrought-iron fence, a giant boulder marks the tomb where Brown and some of his compatriots in the Harper's Ferry raid are now interred. Brown's original headstone, chipped and fading, is encased in glass in an adjacent plot.
There was no parking lot at the site, so at first it felt like we were trespassing. A few cars were parked on the side of the road, but the only person we saw was a man on a riding mower, wearing noise-canceling headphones as he cut the grass. But eventually a few other visitors approached the grave, and we felt less awkward, less out of place.
It came as some surprise to me that John Brown was commemorated as a hero at a state-run historical site. This was not the way his legacy was represented in the grade school I went to in the late 1970s, in what was then an exurban reach of Bucks County, in eastern Pennsylvania. Brown was represented to us not as an abolitionist hero but as a kind of proto–Charles Manson: a wild-haired zealot who murdered innocents in Kansas and then led an armed insurrection against the government with the intent of starting a race war. We didn't learn much else about "bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s, or about the lead-up to the Civil War generally, let alone the barbarity of American slavery in practice. It was all sort of mystified, as if even elementary school children already automatically knew all they needed to know about that.
This was in keeping with the school's general pedagogy with respect to white supremacy in the U.S. Race almost never came up directly; in history classes, it was addressed obliquely at best when topics like the Civil Rights movement demanded it. Generally, racism was represented as a thing of America's past, something that actually existed only in other centuries or in distant places like apartheid-era South Africa.
All my teachers and all but 1% or 2% of my fellow students were white, but rather than this contradicting the post-racism pedagogy, it merely served to expedite it. The entire orientation of my classroom experience was to not only deny that racism was a meaningful part of the culture I belonged to but also to refute the idea that America's racist history had any lasting legacy or significant cultural impact. That my school was de facto segregated was just some sort of accident that required no particular acknowledgement, let alone explanation, just like the Civil War. "Racist" was treated as an epithet, and as Sara Ahmed argues, "one of the best ways you can deflect attention from racism is to hear racism as an accusation."
Basically I was brought up with the worldview that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes as "color-blind racism," in an environment of "racism without racists." This structure, Bonilla-Silva argues, transforms the overt racist practices of Jim Crow into largely invisible mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality. The decreased presence of race in the national discourse then gets taken as proof among white people that they are no longer racist. "The white commonsense view on racial matters is that racists are few and far between, that discrimination has all but disappeared since the 1960s, and that most whites are color blind," he writes. "This view, which emerged in the 1970s, has gone viral with the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008." If nothing else, maybe the election of Donald Trump is closing off this form of pretense.
The pedagogy at my school was a small instance of what philosopher Charles W. Mills in Blackness Visible calls the " 'dark ontology' that is the unacknowledged dark side of the Enlightenment ideal. Simply put: one set of rules for whites, another for nonwhites. All persons are equal, but only white males are persons." From this viewpoint, white identity is not marked by cultural privilege but is instead regarded as simply neutral; the nonwhite viewpoint tends to be depicted as a minority interest, special pleading. Mills makes a strong case that the nonwhite viewpoint is better understood as an "alternative epistemology" that can more accurately grasp the systems of oppression that white people have incentive to ignore or explain away. As the result of living in white supremacist societies, white people (and white men especially) are systematically blinded to much of what makes their worldview possible; generalizing that worldview into a supposedly universal perspective is a key part of that blindness.
That's been my life for the most part. Rather than confront the fact that my view on the world was warped by the privilege I take for granted, I tended to imagine I could have a view from nowhere. I wanted to be free to pretend that it was just my own merit that paved the way for me anytime I actually got anywhere.
I've been too complacent about this, and it's no excuse to note that society is set up to protect this complacency. The sense, sustained by even a minimal exposure to social media (not to mention the narratives of traditional media, or the casual conversations among family and friends, people randomly encountered in stores, at bars, on the train, etc.), that one will immediately face hostility and personal attacks if one starts talking about whiteness or racism becomes another reinforcement for the complacency. Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent essay in the Atlantic charts what some of the political ramifications of this complacency have been. The way Trump's ascendency has been interpreted by the establishment media, he suggests, serves as a further defense of it.
The complexities of sorting out and facing the various intersectional forms of oppression at times appear at times to overwhelm those who face little of that oppression, prompting what Mills calls "the retreat into a nonjudgmental epistemic neutrality." Rather than face the work that needs to be done, it's easy to fantasize about some dodge, some escape from the burden of history and my complicity in it. But there is no place on earth that is not polluted by white supremacy. There's no other hill to climb.