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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

colonialism

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Suppressing the natural

A beige and red-toned fabric cape and headpiece by Chickasaw designer Margaret Roach Wheeler. The headpiece has a beak and a long nape.
“The Messenger”: Cape and headpiece by Margaret Roach Wheeler

At the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, visitors learn about Native dance, art, history, and modern culture. It’s a two-floor archive and represents thousands of years of Native contributions to the Americas.

A recurring theme across the exhibits is colonial religions suppressing Native ceremony. Everywhere their boats took them, European colonizers repressed Natives’ ways of expressing their natural social and spiritual rhythms, and in some places suppression and repression continued for centuries.

For well over fifty years in the United States and Canada—and for centuries in Latin America—church and “civilizing” regulations discouraged and even outlawed many indigenous dances. Deeming the dances an obstacle to assimilation, federal governments prohibited Native societies from performing them.

It wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that laws against ceremonial dances were fully reversed. Today many Native communities continue to preserve their dance traditions, some of which were underground for decades. A powerful impulse, dance is a universal form of expression that remains deeply meaningful in Native America—and integral to Native ceremonial life.”

I noticed this theme woven into anthropological accounts of dances across the Western Hemisphere: dances from Peru, Alaska, British Columbia, and the Great Plains dot the walls of a great, circular hall.

The Brazilian and Colombian Cubeo Oyné dance, for example, is part of a funereal ceremony that was “suppressed by missionaries in the 1940s.” As Janet Chernela explains it, the dance helps the community move “from grief and loss toward play and laughter.” And even that ceremony, a  ceremony that promoted collective healing, was suppressed.

You can count on authoritarianism to suppress the natural and war with any creative expression that doesn’t easily yield to external control. Every piece of art, every moment of embodied joy, each free movement is a reason to dampen energy or translate it into more acceptable forms.

As I’m reflecting on the exhibits in the New York museum, I’m also reflecting on authoritarian religion’s ongoing drive to suppress and control human nature. We gain from playing with structure; and cities like New York depend on our willingness to build our lives on artificial rhythms and patterns.

But I left the museum today wondering about how much we lose in that process of disciplining the human. Which are the other cultures that don’t survive “civilizing” projects?

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Unfaithful allies

A wand of white sage wrapped in red thread, a packet of crushed cedar and herbs, and a braid of sweetgrass wrapped in plastic.

Sage, cedar, and sweetgrass from the annual HoCo Pow-Wow (MD). Photo: K. McKenzie

I finally made it to Howard County’s annual Native American Pow-Wow today. It’s hosted each year by Pow-Wow, Inc., a corporation owned by the Haliwa-Saponi nation based in Hollister, NC, and it’s one of several regional gatherings run by local Native tribes.

Billed participants included the Haliwa-Saponi (NC), Piscataway (Chesapeake Bay, MD), Chickahominy (VA), Rappahannock (MD), Cherokee (south-eastern states), Sioux (midwestern states), Iroquois (north-eastern states), Lumbee (NC), and Navajo (southwestern states).

The Chickahominy nation welcomed the first generation of English settlers to what’s now Virginia in the early 1600s, taught the settlers about local crops and winter survival skills, and made land-use treaties with them as the newcomers adjusted to life in the Western Hemisphere.

And because the English were entirely unfaithful allies, the English gave the Chickahominy treachery, war, and repetitive displacement in return. Virginia only formally recognized the Chickahominy as a tribe the year I was born, and the U.S. government doesn’t list them in its register at all. While federal recognition can mean access to some federal funding, there are also great reasons for tribes not to seek governmental recognition: there’s trash in the federal soup.

Sometimes dogs do bite the hands that feed them. Sometimes people we engage as allies are unworthy of our friendship and knowledge. Sometimes their self-centeredness and aggression yields devastation and tragedy; sometimes humans are grossly inhumane.

I didn’t sense much of that history in the Pow-Wow today. This area is in the midst of a major heatwave and heat indexes surpassed 105° this week. So some nations’ dancers went to other events; the exhibition hall was mostly market, food court, and occasional dance; and the crowds were thin.

It is hard to tell the truth, slant or not, in the thick of summer when school’s out and most people would rather be elsewhere. And people who have given and given and given and received little that’s good in return deserve a day to sell us settlers beads, herbs, and fry bread.

They deserve a day—any day, every day—to help us remember that they’re still here, and that this land is their land.

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More: Race and politics of place

Photo: Christopher Sardegna. A human footprint in wet sand. there are other scratches and tracks to the right of the print. We can see pebbles and the texture of the sand grains.
Photo credit: Christopher Sardegna

Monday’s work on The Game That Shall Not Be Named, colonialism, augmented reality tech, and lineages of state violence went further afield than I expected.

As sites like the Holocaust Museum and Arlington National Cemetery begin to push back against the game’s boundaries, there are plenty of thoughtful, worth-reading articles about the broader connections and the moment that we’re in.

This moment holds the potential for deeper and more substantial awareness of all that’s shaped us and all we’ve yet to do than we’ve ever had.

It’s also clear to me that this awareness will not be televised, produced or commercially broadcast because it isn’t the kind of awareness that comforts. It’s an awareness that undermines neutrality claims, nostalgic appeals, supposedly amoral innovation, and all violent supremacies.

Read up:

  • On the African American Intellectual History Society site, Brandon Byrd traces the military, policing, and colonial footprints in the story of the United States’ occupation of once-free Haiti.

    The justifications, the technologies, the casualties. What distinguishes them at home and abroad? What separates the cultures of imperialism and militarism from domestic policing?

    “Nothing. That is the answer that more and more scholars and activists are bringing to light. It is the answer that black intellectuals including Langston Hughes articulated decades ago.” —Brandon Byrd, July 14, 2016

  • Henry Rollins challenges the misinformation peddled on the 24-hour networks and highlights how our immediate and direct access to recurring violence could bridge the gaps between the “two Americas.”

    Things are bad, but I would posit that they have been this way for as far back into American history as you want to go. What has changed is the amount of information available to the average citizen. Thanks to cellphones and people employing social networking to spread news quickly, what goes on minute to minute has crossed the line into overload… There are at least two different Americas. They have existed in an environment of almost unbroken mutual exclusivity. That’s over now.” —Henry Rollins, July 14, 2016

  • truth-out’s William C. Anderson studies recent instances of state violence, argues for a global movement rather than one limited by the isolated nation-state, and warns that repression is likely to follow protest.

    Understanding and drawing from the fact the whole world—not simply one state or country—is full of oppressed and disillusioned people might be key to advancing our struggles. I believe, as Malcolm X once said, that freedom will come when we start identifying ourselves with oppressed people around the world, building with them, and forming effective movements against imperialism.” —William C. Anderson, July 13, 2016

  • Niantic holds open the door to advertisers, Maureen Morrison reports: why not monetize all of this volunteered location data?

    According to SimilarWeb, 5.9% of all Android users opened the app on Monday.

    Soon enough, marketers will be able to target those people through sponsored locations within the wildly popular mobile game. Niantic, the game’s developer and a spin off of Google, said earlier in the week that it would offer advertisers sponsored locations down the road, a move that will especially appeal to retailers, but few details were given.

    On Wednesday, Niantic CEO John Hanke told the Financial Times that sponsored locations may come sooner [rather] than later.” —Maureen Morrison, July 14, 2016

  • Brendan Keogh, an Australian design lecturer, uses some of the same data points I did, but draws on the original game’s Japanese history to address how players and residents negotiate memory and shared space.

    The handwringing that has always followed Pokémon’s popularity to claim it is essentially cutesy cockfighting has always missed the point that it was never really about fighting at all; that was nothing but a pretence for collecting, exploring, and discovering a grand, old, pre-urbanised world that a young kid could adventure through all by themselves…

    “Pokémon Go isn’t really doing much new. It takes well-established technologies and modes of play from AR, the existing data from Ingress, and incorporates them with the well-established brand that is Pokémon—a brand already built around the idea of exploring public spaces. It then circumvents the need for players to own unique hardware to play the game, instead being free-to-play on the mobile device already owned by both those kids discovering it for the first time and those adults who remember it with a fond nostalgia.” —Brendan Keogh, July 14, 2016 (emphasis added)

  • Finally, Alex Hern at the London Guardian rounds up several of the spatial conflicts that have emerged since the game launched last week.

    Who does own the virtual space around you? I can’t put a billboard on your house without asking you; but is it so obvious that I should be allowed to put a virtual billboard “on” your house without giving you any say in the matter?

    … Perhaps the best thing to do is to look backwards, not forward, for solutions. In the early days of the 20th century, another technological revolution raised questions of control, trespass and oversight: the aeroplane.” —Alex Hern, July 13, 2016

Aishwarya Subramanian, a doctoral student who studies fantasy, colonialism, and place, has written on the game for an Indian online paper. Her piece draws from my article.

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When colonialism is a game

A cropped screenshot of the Android Pokémon GO app listing. Faded over the image is a section of a 1587 map of the so-called New World. The map focuses on what is now called North and South America
Pokémon GO has over 5 million downloads on the Android OS. Map ;via USF’s Maps ETC. Image: Keisha E. McKenzie

This time last week, Nintendo and data-game developer Niantic co-released a new location and treasure hunt game, Pokémon GO, as part of Nintendo’s Pokémon franchise. Niantic began as an in-house Google startup, and has made its name with products in the augmented reality category. The companies have been separate for nine months.

Today, Pokémon GO leads mobile app rankings in the US, and Monday was a great day for Nintendo’s stock. (Forbes doubts it’s worth it.)

Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, LA, where police shot and killed Alton Sterling last week, 138 miles away from where Essence Bowman died in police custody at the end of June, “heavily armed riot police” invaded Lisa Batiste-Swilley’s yard to collect and arrest anti-brutality protesters.

Batiste-Swilley explained to CBS reporter David Begnaud how it felt to be railroaded and her property targeted and physically overrun by local officers. (The Twitter clip is rough, uncaptioned, and embedded.) 1

Finally, in Missouri, where police shot and killed Michael Brown in August 2014, officers worried that people who play Pokémon GO in unfamiliar locations could fall vulnerable to crime and injury.

Now’s your chance to discover and capture the Pokémon all around you—so get your shoes on, step outside, and explore the world.” —Pokémon GO‘s app description

One of the most common lines in articles about this game are that it’s great for “exploring.” Exploring what? Crowds are—as I type—milling around Central Park and getting summer-fresh air, phones in hand and eyes on screen. They’re exploring something, but whether that something is Central Park is not obvious.

Mashable reports that the pool at the 9/11 memorial in New York is a registered Pokéstop, a location where players can collect game characters. A few states away in Massachusetts, Boon Sheridan’s family home has become unusually interesting to pedestrians and drivers alike: it was once a church, it’s on the Pokémon GO location list, and gamers keep hovering.

Players seeking out virtual Pokéstops and gyms, where characters battle other characters, have to go to the game-indicated locations in the physical world. And in order to get their points, they get to traipse up and through these places to “collect” what’s there regardless of the local context.

Regardless of the people already present, regardless of whether that place is a site that the community holds sacred, home, yard, or national memorial—there are points to be gathered.

Early this morning, Twitter user @pyratejack explained that Pokémon GO‘s underlying location data is user-generated data from Niantic’s older location game, Ingress. And Ingress included World War II concentration camps in its location data until Germans protested two years ago.

Ingress is made by Niantic Labs, essentially a tiny startup inside Google run by John Hanke, the brains behind Google Earth, Maps and Street View.” —Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY, July 2, 2015

What makes big data “Big Data” is its sheer scale. And what makes user-contributed data challenging is the labor required to review, clean, and validate it. Like the government, data companies like Google have exobytes of data about ordinary people and our lived world. Much of that data is from the open source web, and the rest is, like Pokémon GO‘s source data, user-contributed.

This isn’t 2013 or 2014, and our headlines aren’t full of “metadata” or “surveillance” anymore, but the data is still accumulating from our phone companies, street and highway cameras, social media profiles and app use.

More and more devices are location-aware, or talk to devices that are location-aware. This lets you recreate people’s movements decades after the fact, something we’ve never been able to do before.

If you have a predictive search engine, it stores all kinds of things that people paste into their text fields by accident, including passwords… The whole point of having a data lake is so you can just chuck things in there and go fishing for patterns later…

We teach [the government] how to spy on us. When they want the data badly enough, they just come and take it.” —Maciej Ceglowski, Haunted by Data, October 1, 2015 2

Some data companies are actively investing in data science and development; others are cutting expenses by passing onto the public the labor of contributing to their databases. Some companies are also cutting expenses on development and analysis by only minimally assessing the quality of data that users submit. But when the convention of these companies is share and share alike, one company’s app and underlying databases lead to the next. Ingress becomes Pokémon GO.

It’s not the technology per se that worries me, it’s the lack of historical perspective and depth, and quite frankly the lack of values and ethics.” —R. Avraham Cooper, the Simon Wiesenthal Center

“It seems a little insensitive,” Mashable’s Andrea Romano mused this morning, for the 9/11 memorial to be transmogrified into “a gathering spot so people can scoop up little cartoon monsters.”

Had there been apps like Ingress in the days of Vespucci, Cortés, Columbus, Smith, and Raleigh, they would have been based on user-generated maps, and these maps, like the maps these naval explorers actually used, would have aggregated objects of desire all over the Western Hemisphere.

Regardless of context, regardless of the people already in situ, regardless of whether the objects’ locations were community sacred sites, regardless of local meanings, Vespucci, Cortés, Columbus, Smith, and Raleigh operated on the principle that their virtual data adventures trumped local data and life.

Wherever their maps showed the fountain of youth or the city of gold, even if those locations overlaid entire nations and peoples, they claimed the right to go, explore, discover, and capture, and people’s lives became their gamespace.

As Pokémon GO overlays objects of desire on places with local significance, players play the game by using its maps to trump local experience. It’s post-16th Century colony, but not at all postcolonial. We’re demonstrating that when we get the chance to enroll in well-worn habits of relation and place, we take them.

So this logic is likely to keep surfacing: in the just-a-game of Pokémon GO, in urban renewal and gentrification programs, in civic technology, and in the products of businesses like Niantic. In the same way that corporations and governments find ways to use the data we conventionally produce, both corporations and governments will find ways to leverage our wish to augment reality and play with location.

In this climate though, Baton Rouge must be a warning to us: whether we’re escaping our troubles or deadly serious about protests, the government has the power to make even our house-guests its objects of desire. Armed with riot gear and legal force, it can and will “collect” from us whatever it wants whenever it wants it.

And we are teaching it how.

  1. Today, locals explained that they know Batiste-Swilley to be a justice advocate. She is also the most recent board chair of an HIV/AIDS nonprofit in Baton Rouge; feel free to support the organization’s work. [Back to text: ◄]
  2. Jonathan Stegall shared Ceglowski’s talk with me this morning. Read the whole thing: it’s well worth it. [Back to text: ◄]

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Confronting the First Colony and Our Acceptable Trades

I’m driving down North Carolina Highway 158 late at night, the peninsula woods flanking the road. It’s so dark here.

The moon is about half full. Clusters of trees stand bare and stiff in the black.

I can see the stars through the windshield. Orion’s south of me, lying on his side like the prophet who dramatized the fall of the two kingdoms, not moving for hundreds of days at a time. I wonder if Orion will watch this kingdom fall.

At barely 8 p.m., but for the pig barbecue restaurants and gas stations, the area seems deserted. This is a universe away from Ferguson “Ground Zero” Missouri, or #NMOS14 in Baltimore or Die-Ins in Boston or #BoycottBlackFriday in New York or #FloodWallStreet or the People’s Climate March or the lobbying networks of Washington, D.C. There’s nothing so banal as international politics and nothing so earnest as dead human bodies on a dark highway in North Carolina.

Google map of the North Carolina Peninsula. The strip of land cuts south-east across the right half of the map
North Carolina’s Peninsula from Currituck to Roanoke. | (c) Google, 2014

I first crossed the bridge into the Outer Banks a year ago, two short months after the U.S. government granted me residency status. The form letter I was afraid to open transformed me in an instant from “non-immigrant” with uncertain options to “permanent resident” with all the mythology of progress and opportunity in my lap, staring me down, asking me, “Why aren’t you already succeeding? This is the Dream!”

And then I drove out to North Carolina, and crossed the Currituck Sound toward Nags Head. Eventually I came to Roanoke Island and walked around a mound now enclosed by a small, manicured government museum.

The exhibition marker said the mound marked the site of the village where one hundred and eighteen 16th Century English settlers encountered the Croatan people and their leaders Manteo and Wanchese. There the English saw how the indigenous people thrived, what they fished, what they traded, which crops they grew—crops like tobacco, and what else the English would be able to take back east.

What they could take for the glory of the Crown: Gold and goods for the glory of God.

A lithograph of the baptism of Virginia Dare
“Baptism of Virginia Dare” by Henry Howe, 1880 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Wanchese and Manteo joined Walter Raleigh on a fundraising and PR trip back to England. Both helped Raleigh’s linguist to interpret the Algonquian language, and their presence—proof of the new people over the horizon—supported Raleigh’s campaign to raise more money for more settlements across the ocean. Both Wanchese’s and Manteo’s names survive today on their own land. But only Wanchese nursed doubts about the settling English.

Within three years of the English settlers’ arrival, Manteo had submitted to baptism into the Church of England—and hence positioned himself under the authority of the Queen. I find no record of Wanchese’s conversion. Today, the town named after Manteo is a quaint, self-consciously historical place that hugs the waterfront and hopes strangers will stop by. I wonder if Manteo’s spirit has ever left his land.

A few days before Thanksgiving this year, I searched for some of the native peoples indigenous to the area of Maryland I live in. The internet told me that the majority of those who’d received the English in the 1600s had fallen to genocide, disease, colonialism, or displacement by the 1700s: the Tutelo and Suponi languages are extinct, the English pushed the Suponi from Central Maryland into what is now Ohio, smallpox and lynching destroyed the Susquehannocks who once lived to the north, and the Accohannocks lost their land up and down the Eastern Shore.

I learned for the first time about the headrights land distribution system concocted out of thin air in New England and exported south to Maryland. The English settlers told each other that the Crown authorized them to grant and gift this land to other English newcomers. Settlers who brought more servants and more slaves would get more land in proportion to the number of humans that trailed them.

More servants and slaves? More land granted. As the colonial religion taught, “For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.”

I learned about how quickly tobacco enmeshed itself with the colonial economy and the emerging racial hierarchy: Scharf’s History of Maryland from the earliest period to the present (1765-1812) traces the connection back to the mid 1600s and the nascent “negro code.” The crop became a currency used to trade for Black freedom or compensate society for Black “crimes” or White “permissiveness.”

“In addition to being employed for purchasing goods, the tobacco currency was also used to pay fines and taxes. For example, persons encouraging Negro meetings were to be fined 1000 pounds of tobacco; owners letting Negroes keep horses were fined 500 pounds tobacco; if a person wanted to become married, he had to go to the rector of his parish and pay the man so many pounds of tobacco; a man’s wealth was estimated in annual pounds of tobacco.

“Tobacco also affected the government as all laws were made more or less with reference to it: to protect it, and to maintain its value in price, so that many of the civil and some of the criminal processes, were affected by it.” (Emphasis added. Read “Economic Aspects of Tobacco during the Colonial Period 1612-1776” for more.)

If a 3-minute video is more your speed, check out the History Channel’s beatification of the colonial cash crop: “Tobacco is the leading edge of colonial commerce,” Wesleyan University’s Richard Slotkin tells us.

Two days before I left for North Carolina this year, a New York grand jury reviewed the death of Eric Garner and chose not to indict the officer in whose hands he died. I heard the news on Twitter. I didn’t have the energy to be angry and I couldn’t even muster up surprise. After the non-indictment in Missouri, I saw no reason to expect an indictment in New York.

But puzzle pieces were rearranging themselves in my subconscious mind, and it wasn’t until I walked around the Peninsula that they finally clicked in place.

Jon Stewart recently excoriated Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for suggesting that Garner’s death was due to overzealous taxing. The segment was amusing, and the senator’s attempt to derail clumsy, but there is a story under the story. Both Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s last days included the sale and policing of tobacco as a legal drug. Today, as in the colonial 1600s, the trade of legal and illegal drugs “affects the government as all laws are made more or less with reference to it.”

The Western Hemisphere drug trade almost permanently undermines the stability of our southern neighbor Mexico: to simplify, demand and selective prosecution thrive on this side of the border, and supply and selective prosecution thrive on that side. The trade is entangled with other resources we desire, deem national interests, and generate criminalization and foreign policies to secure. The national desire for fuel is another major entanglement that not only interacts with military policy but also circles back to the production and illicit trade of drugs elsewhere around the world.

So the drug trade is a silent, deadly cast member in the modern political farce otherwise known as immigration reform: US non-immigration, immigration, and the matrix of natural and civil rights that most citizens expect but some never get—rights like due process.

(Sidebar for my US citizen readers: non-immigration involves entering a nation-state’s borders to visit, study, or do temporary work without the intent to permanently reside. Immigration involves entering a nation-state’s borders with the intent to make a long-term or permanent home [residency] or become a citizen.)

Migration has happened in this hemisphere for thousands and thousands of years without states to control it. But non-immigration and immigration are comparatively new and depend on the shifting definitions of the nation-state. The value of our lives also depends on the shifting definitions of the nation-state.

A year after becoming a resident, I’m still working out what it means to participate with my presence in the settling and displacement project that the Spanish and English began here in the 1500s and 1600s. But I’m also genetically, historically, and viscerally connected to that part of the Black diaspora that was ported against its will to the Americas to support the colonial drug trade.

After four hundred years of colonization here, certain kinds of lives lost—indigenous, Black, poor, queer—are still accounted disposable and can still be deemed acceptable trades as long as the overall logic of the system is undisturbed. As long as only authorized hands administer the manufacture, sale, and taxation of our favorite plants and resources on this continent or far, far from home, what are a few lives?

I’m not adjusted to that. One of my deepest worries: that I will adjust, that as I’ve adjusted in diet and speech over my last decade, I’ll adjust in philosophy too. A writer imagines the Pilgrims and the Borg disembarking in Massachusetts and co-intoning the futility of resistance.

And, looking into the woods of Roanoke or the dead-empty eastern Carolina horizon, I have no solid proof that they’re wrong except, perhaps, my own existence. Some of us do survive, and we call on Orion to witness us.

An egret sits on a wood pillar in the foreground, which is in shadow. In the background, a wide sky is awash in deep sunset blues and oranges. No sun is visible.
(c) Keisha McKenzie

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Two Brothers, One Colonial Church

This post began as a series of tweets. What do you mean you don’t follow me on Twitter?

All I did was google the symbol of the burning cross. I wanted to know where it started: how the primary Christian symbol ended up aflame and overshadowed by American racists.

I read that the Scottish once used the fiery cross, the Crann Tara, to summon allies during times of danger or war. Google then pointed me to Thomas Dixon, Jr., Baptist preacher and author of the Romantic (not romantic) novel The Clansman (1905).

The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan was one of a series of novels on the post-Civil War South, the Klan, and treacherous Northern government. Within 10 years, The Clansman had become D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation, an earnest three-hour tour of the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, and the key tropes of Southern racism:

  • besieged, mistreated Southern landowners;
  • power-hungry and manipulative Northern politicians;
  • helpless Southern White women;
  • bug-eyed, violent, predatory ‘Negro’ freemen—most of them White actors in blackface;
  • attempted rape of the Southern woman;
  • outraged noble townsmen;
  • community catharsis through lynching.

(Watch the full video at your own discretion.)

“Griffith and ‘The Birth of a Nation’ were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all.” —Roger Ebert, 2003

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Thomas Dixon, Jr., had a brother who was just five months younger than him. Amzi Clarence Dixon also preached in the Baptist tradition and wrote and edited several books of his own. Rather than American Romance novels, A.C. Dixon wrote Christian apologetics, and the most famous project he contributed to was The Fundamentals, a 1911 collection of essays identifying the non-negotiable tenets of the Christian faith.

The brother of the man who introduced the Klan to its modern terrorism symbol co-edited the main text of US fundamentalism. I had no idea. But it makes the most perverse sense.

Early this October, a modern Southern Klansman pled guilty to burning a cross in the yard of an interracial family: he actually was arrested and charged, underwent trial, pled guilty, and is subject to 20 years in jail. So are his accomplices. So some big picture items have changed in the last century!

But others haven’t.

When I look at where some of the most dogged prejudices persist in the public sphere, I’m seeing rows of preachers and pews of believers behind them.

I’m beginning to doubt that conventional Christianity’s institutions can recognize colonial reasoning patterns. And it may be that they can’t recognize colonial reasoning because they are themselves colonial. Christianity and colonialism have always been enmeshed.

When I saw the literal bond between Thomas Dixon Jr. (literature, pulpit, KKK) and A.C. Dixon (law, pulpit, fundamentalism), it pulled me up short. I didn’t stall because of the cortisol spike of surprise or stress, but because it was so dully monotonous: there it was again, the common law marriage of the cross and the sword.

Two facets of colonialism interest me most: the “go to all the earth” expansionist expression and within-the-borders internal functions: the definitions and constructed classes that stratify the colonizing group, the stratification processes, the rules of nobility and inter-class mobility, policy and law, and so on. Toni Morrison articulates several of these intra-border functions and their ability to distract the targets of colonialism in her classic 1975 lecture at Portland State.

But that moment made me wonder why the Dixons’ path was more familiar than shocking: why the same colonialist logic permits secular racism as permits religious domination. Both, I realized, depend on hatred for and exclusion of various forms of difference. Religious communities like the Dixons’ Southern Baptist denomination haven’t been subtle about transferring their founding logic from one minority (e.g. US Blacks) to others (e.g. LGBTQ people).

Thomas + A.C. Dixon’s father was a slave-owner who joined the Klan but later left it because he thought it corrupt, not because he found it wrong. The two brothers grew up during Reconstruction, when the U.S. was fumbling both abolition and Black emancipation and had no relatives or other elders to challenge the lessons their country was teaching them about who was of value and who was not.

They didn’t grow up with a sense of moral or intellectual equality between their people and other groups. The religion they adopted and that trained them to teach others didn’t teach them to recognize that equality either. It’s an incalculable waste of myths, rites, and ethics when a religion doesn’t even nudge a person toward growing up.

As it was, both brothers used the power of the written, spoken, and legal word to promote inequality between Whites and so-called “lesser races.” Thomas Dixon, Jr. advanced it through his pro-White fiction, while A.C. Dixon enshrined it through pro-fundamentalist speeches and the doctrines that still dominate the US public view of the Church today.

T. Dixon’s fiction inspired over a century of White nationalist racism, from The Clansman and Birth of a Nation to the hate organizations that still sputter along this century. A.C. Dixon’s doctrines mingled with the 1900s’ reaction against modernism, and in part because of that movement, we’re still forced to debate basic human rights with religious people.

As the legal tide slowly shifts, some groups are willing to concede denominational policies to racist, sexist, heterosexist, and/or ableist people and continue to debate only shared, civil law. That’s not a trade-off I’m comfortable making, and the reason why not is in the logic of colonial religion itself.

Colonial religion claims that it overrules limited civic authority. It represents itself as the universal truth. Colonial religion appeals to its god over all gods and proposes its standards are the First Law all other laws will ultimately fall subject to.

So if a believer’s universal Real True Morality is racist, sexist, heterosexist, or ableist, if that’s what the archetype of righteousness is, it doesn’t comfort me that the believer is willing to reserve the place of worship and religious institutions for herself and adopt a Prime Directive-style non-interference policy with regard to the rest of the planet. It may seem magnanimous for a time, but it becomes discomforting when weekend services include the message that one day, very soon, the believers’ god will return to enforce Real True Morality and smash the upstart state into oblivion.

When that’s the underlying religious story, that one day universal Real True Morality will trump localized accommodating state morality, I’m going to question the quality of those “universal” rules, policies, and doctrines. If they will govern me now or govern me later, what’s the point in waiting to question them?

Religious colonialism is opaque to many of those who exercise it, and even to some of those marginalized by it, because it is everywhere. Some groups have opted out of institutional state support and suffered persecution for it, but even these groups aren’t wholly free from colonialism, racism, or the marginalization of social minorities.

My invitation, especially for those from denominations that have historically been either marginal or tentative with the state, is that we recognize how we nevertheless act as agents of colonial marginalization in our own spheres.

“The beast” many of us have seen in the state isn’t Other to us. It is us. The questions we have to answer are whether we can recognize our own handiwork when it spills over in the town square and whether we can rewrite our own code, the ideological and perceptual code that drives our beast-like influence on the world.