Forced Removal of Undesirables: A Long and Terrible History In America

 

By 1900, a little over 237,000 Indians were alive in the United States out of an estimated 12-15 million from over 300 native nations that existed in North America in 1492. This huge loss of life was a result of formal and informal government policy along with settler behavior towards Indians that included outright, planned murder, destruction of primary food resources, famine, malnutrition, enslavement, incessant forced removals, and constant social stress, which desperately weakened bodies and enabled pathogens to thrive.

 

Thomas Jefferson urged “. . . their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes or Illinois River.”  Benjamin Franklin mused in his autobiography, “ . . . and indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means.”

 

When Washington, “the Father of our country” died, his 200 slaved were working on his farm in Virginia. Jefferson owned 600 salves through his lifetime. When Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal,” he did not intend to include women, Indians, black people, or white men without property in that “equality.”

 

The history of US racism, murder, and forced removals of undesirables is long and bloody.

 

In the modern era, homeless people are considered by many otherwise well-meaning elected officials and homeowners to be among the “undesirables.” This latter understanding, operationally an extension of ancient historical attitudes, is based on the idea that property-less people are akin to stateless persons, and since ownership of property was baked in at the onset of the nation as the lynchpin portal to all other rights, a property-less individual does not share in those “inalienable” rights of assembly, free speech and due process.

 

 

Thus, tomorrow, June 24, 2020, the Santa Rosa City Council will once again order the forced removal of a number of homeless individuals to re-scatter them, accomplished as always within the laws and so-called protections passed as sops to soften the truth of what they are really doing. As with Indians and blacks, the intention is to eliminate a social problem by ignoring the facts that produce these conditions: inadequate and unaffordable housing for thousands, little or no health care for thousands, and loss of employment as a function of a cruelly-structured economy.

 

The council members may wish to see themselves as revered like our Founding Fathers have been. They might not wish so if they took a closer look at those Founding Fathers, or their own actions that repeat our terrible crimes against “undesirables.”

 

It appears that the murder of George Floyd and the resulting demonstrations throughout the country may be causing some whites to try to understand their role in perpetuating racism baked into their white privilege that exacerbates the continued suffering of blacks from those unconscious attitudes. Likewise, we as a people have never come to terms with our bloody history of genocide against both Indians and blacks. And likewise, consciousness regarding what elected officials are doing to those without homes in our names is a shameful continuation in other clothes of these ancient behaviors: Instead of fixing human suffering through direct action, let’s just disperse them.”

 

Our collective behavior towards modern undesirables constitutes nothing less than crimes against humanity. Tomorrow, during these crimes, we must be there, and chant

our chant: “Forced removals are crimes against humanity.” We must pass flyers to police that read: “Your participation in forcefully removing unhoused persons is a crime against humanity. This is being recorded for history and legal claims that will be entered in the Office for Civil Rights and the World Court. As a matter of conscience, stop this crime.”

 

Terry Rowan

All quotes used above come from an article in the New York Review of Books entitled

“The Intent Was Genocide” by Peter Nabokov, pp.51-52