In April, at a bookstore in the heart of our nation’s capital, a small group of white supremacists interrupted an event being held for a new release, a book called Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland.
Just as author Jonathan Metzl began commenting on “how much stronger America is when we think about our responsibility to people in need,” the group made its way to the front. “This land is our land! This land is our land!” they shouted percussively, shaking their fists in the air with each syllable before quickly storming out.
“They’re illustrating my point,” Metzl later told The Washington Post.
The incident also brings into focus a reality that undergirds much of our politics and history, often invisibly. From colonization and the forced removal of indigenous peoples, to civil rights-era redlining, to modern-day gerrymandering and gentrification—where Americans live, or are allowed to live, has defined this country as much as any national boundary. As we grapple with the horrors of migrant concentration camps and the heightened militarization of our borders, we must also recognize and address the many physical lines drawn within this country that marginalize and harm people, citizens and not, from sea to shining sea.
Where Americans live, or are allowed to live, has defined this country as much as any national boundary.
Though you may not realize it, this subject is front-and-center in the national conversation. As you’ll read elsewhere in this issue of The Progressive, the U.S. Supreme Court recently weighed in on two major where-we-live cases. In one, it stepped aside on gerrymandering, declaring that it is up to individual states to address the issue of politicians drawing the boundary lines for their own districts, often securing their positions of power.
In another, it ruled against the Trump Administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census. The Census, of course, is used to determine the amount of federal funding funneled to and the number of political representatives for various states and municipalities based on their demographics.
“The Census tells us who we are and where we are going as a nation,” its website proclaims. But places with larger populations of noncitizens—who by now may be too scared to fill out the Census in the first place—stand to lose out.
Redlining—the practice of banks denying loans to prospective home buyers in majority-minority areas—has also come hurling back to the forefront. After a year-long analysis based on thirty-one million records, a 2018 report by online investigative outlet Reveal found lending disparities everywhere from Atlanta to Tacoma, Detroit to San Antonio. The report concluded that the “homeownership gap between whites and African Americans, which had been shrinking since the 1970s, has exploded since the housing bust. It is now wider than it was during the Jim Crow era.”
The result, one advocate observed, has been the creation, in cities throughout the nation, of a border. “OK, we’ll allow you to go this far,” she told Reveal, mimicking the lenders. “You’re not going to go any further.”
Before 1968, of course, redlining was perfectly legal—one of myriad ways the government endorsed a lack of investment in certain communities. The effect was, and is, as stark as an other-side-of-the-tracks dividing line. Metzl, the author, recounts this phenomenon and its legacy today in a section of Dying of Whiteness dealing with his boyhood home in Kansas City, Missouri.
“Our Missouri home was a mere two blocks from State Line Road, an innocuous-looking thoroughfare dividing the Kansas part of the city from the Missouri one,” he writes. “To the casual observer, State Line looks like any other road in any other town. But kids who grew up nearby knew the difference. The Missouri side of the road felt always unkempt. The Kansas side was cleaner. If you got a new bike, you wanted to ride it on the Kansas side, since the roads were smoother and better maintained. If you planned a summer party, you wanted to hold it in a park on the Kansas side as well, where you could count on well-mowed grass and clean facilities and bathrooms. Then there were the schools. If you lived on the Missouri side, you grew tired of watching your friends move to Kansas around the time that they reached junior high.”
Back then, Metzl notes, Missouri “had a larger African American population than did Kansas, and courts repeatedly found black districts under-resourced and overcrowded.” Still today, Kansas City, Missouri, has a higher percentage of black residents than Kansas City, Kansas.
All of which leads us back to the white supremacists who interrupted Metzl’s book event. When they claimed “this land is our land,” it was not solely a xenophobic reference to the Trump-termed “invasion” of migrants at our door. It played into a long history of nationalism that violently defines who has the right to belong within borders.
During the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesters chanted “Blood and soil!,” an English version of the German Nazi phrase “Blut und boden.” In the early 1930s and into Adolph Hitler’s rule, the eventual minister of food and agriculture Richard Walther Darré pushed this phrase as a way to characterize farmers—those who worked the rural land—as the ideal, in contrast with Jews who were stereotyped as city-dwelling merchants and bankers.
“The strongest personality today no longer calls for personality, but for type: the folkish earth-rooted lifestyle,” leading Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote in his 1930 book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century. “We would like to observe and affirm that the intangible idea of folkish honor has its roots in the strongest grounds of all, in the most material of all reality; in the farmland of a nation, in its living space.”
But this attitude is not solely that of street-marching Nazis. Take, for example, Trump’s July tweet, directed at four Democratic Congresswomen of color, to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Only one of the four lawmakers was born outside the United States. This demonstrated yet again that, just as surely as migrants are inhumanely deterred at our borders, national identity is tyrannically policed inside them.
In his book Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, which surveys increasingly militarized national border regimes around the globe, University of Hawaii associate professor Reece Jones cites scholar and author Mark Neocleous. He says Neocleous suggests that “the underlying purposes of the police and the military are the same—to protect the sovereignty of the state from internal and external threats—but the distinction has been maintained to create the perception that internal practices are less severe.”
In fact, two out of three people in America live within 100 miles of a national boundary, a vast swath where the Border Patrol has authority to operate. This includes cities like New York, Chicago, and Seattle, but also such deep inland locations as Wausau, Wisconsin.
After being stopped at a checkpoint within this “100-mile border zone” between El Paso and Marfa, Texas, novelist Laila Lalami wrote in The New York Times, “the border separates not just nationals from foreigners, rich from poor, and north from south, but also order from chaos, civilization from barbarians, decent people from criminals. Location becomes character, with everything that designation entails.”
All of this has vast implications, especially as climate change escalates and pushes people from their homes. In general, public awareness of the climate factor in migration is growing, in part due to national media coverage of the Trump Administration’s manufactured border crisis. Reports of Hondurans and Guatemalans forced to leave their drought-stricken coffee farms have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, and NPR, to name a few.
But according to the United Nations, most climate-driven migration happens within national borders, not across them. As more and more American communities are uprooted by rising sea levels or super-charged, back-to-back hurricanes, we will see waves of internal migration inside this country. From California to the New York island, entire cities are redrawing their coastlines, and whole neighborhoods of people are moving to higher ground—escaping rising sea levels, regular flooding, hurricane damage, and the mere threat of another likely disaster.
At this year’s annual National Adaptation Forum, held in Madison, Wisconsin, attorney and executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice Robin Bronen discussed a word she coined for the phenomenon of climate-driven displacement: climigration. It captures an ever-more-glaring legal gap regarding those forced out due to the impacts of climate change—who are not technically “refugees” as they are not protected by government-defined refugee status.
Bronen works with (mostly indigenous) coastal villages in her state experiencing what they call in Yu’pik usteq, or “catastrophic land loss,” due to climate change. There is no federal or state agency with the consistent mandate or funding to help communities like these with relocating. So they are now in the midst of developing a locally driven relocation process for themselves, even holding the “First Peoples’ Convening on Climate-Forced Displacement” in October 2018. The plans they come up with could be used by other communities in similar situations.
In 2006, after many New Orleans residents fled to Houston following Hurricane Katrina, one town hall meeting of wealthy Houstonians erupted with demands to end “perpetual entitlements” for “Katrina illegal immigrants.” One group of these displaced survivors organized under the name NOAH, or New Orleans Association of Houston.
“Orleanians in exile is how we thought of ourselves,” retired Dillard University professor and NOAH leader Mtangulizi Sanyika told The Progressive in 2017, after yet another hurricane, Harvey, had inundated his adopted city. “There’s nowhere to run. There’s nowhere to hide.”