I recently had the good fortune of a live-streamed New York Public Library conversation with philosopher and journalist Barrett Holmes Pitner. The focus of our discussion was his book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America.
The Crime Without a Name is a refreshing text in public philosophy of race, ethnicity, and culture. It has a clearly stated thesis, is informative on every page, and at no moment patronizes the reader. It is philosophically rich without being abstruse, and it is transdisciplinary through bringing together history, journalism, law, linguistics, literature, philosophy, political economy, and sociology. Additionally, given its focus on words—their formulation and utilization—I had expected its philosophical leanings to be primarily analytical philosophical linguistics, but, instead, I found a wonderful exemplification of ecumenical philosophy in which existentialism—in this case, Black existentialism—and its dialectical elements come to the fore. In short, I’m delighted to be able to add this book to my bibliography of Black existential writings, and, more, to the studies I will conduct and teach in philosophy of race, racism, and social and political theory.
The organizing theme or word in the book is “ethnocide,” which was, along with “genocide,” coined by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish activist, jurist, and law professor who successfully lobbied for the United Nations to declare genocide an international crime. We’ve benefited greatly from Lemkin’s refusal to accept the official legal position of his times on, for example, the slaughtering of Armenians in Turkey. The old official position was that, under international laws of sovereignty, a country could do whatever it pleases to its people (Pitner, 16–17). One could imagine Lemkin’s experience of witnessing the accuracy of his terms to describe what he knew should be criminal played out in the Holocaust during WWII. Lemkin narrowly escaped to the United States, but what he saw in the treatment of Black and Indigenous peoples in the country in which he found refuge revealed the irony of his situation. We should not forget, for instance, that Nazi Germany was inspired by the United States’ brutal policies against Blacks and Native Americans.
The book’s thesis is that ethnocide utilizes linguistic resources of erasure. The United States, whose society he analyzes under the familiar and problematic metonym “America,” is an antidemocratic society that uses words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” and “liberty” alongside and often in denial of its history of genocide, ethnocide, enslavement, and capitalist exploitation (prioritizing profit instead of people). Ethnocide involves erasing a people’s culture while preserving their bodies as blank slates onto which to write the hegemonic culture. An ongoing problem (among many) is that the hegemonic culture disguises itself and responds, in psychoanalytical terms, with narcissistic rage when challenged. Think, for example, of the hoopla fomented from right-wing groups and legislatures engaged in lawfare (the use of law as a weapon of war) against critical race theory and Black voters.
Pitner’s book also reveals, albeit not explicitly so, how certain philosophical approaches are, albeit often unintentionally, in league with ethnocide. A case in point is the contrast between how Pitner examines words and that of the dominant American approach to philosophy—Anglo-analytical—which tends to be formalistic and nominalist. The hegemonic approach mirrors the isolated individualism Pitner analyzes and criticizes, and its formalism is often (if not exclusively) premised on forms of erasure in the name of “neutrality” in which what is left—especially in the North American and other Anglo-postcolonial contexts—is, basically, whiteness or white normativity.
The opposite of the hegemonic, formalistic, and reductionistic approach to philosophy is a relational, community-based, social understanding of language and words. In that alternative, communicability is key, which requires the validity, or necessity, of the Other or, less ostentatious, others. The existentialist examinations of words in Pitner’s book are socially situated; words live through their communicability, practice, and capacity to build or to destroy sociality.
Pitner’s analysis also addresses the norms of ethnocidal and racist societies, wherein investments in lies lead to ignoring the impact of bad actions through a reliance on supposed pristine intent. Referring to G.W. Bush’s actions against Iraq in 2003, Pitner writes: “Good intent does not make a good person” (46). We should bear in mind that neither Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, nor Dick Cheyney ever admitted wrong or apologize for the destruction they produced. Neither, more recently, have Trump and his enablers. This is well stated throughout the text, but see pages 75–76, in which Trump’s litany of lies and their impact are summarized. Pitner’s argument leads to a biting reflection: Trump’s lying is emblematic of his very American brand of “authenticity.” We could add to this that the clear evidence of criminal activity from Bush et al. through to Trump et al. offers a truth about this peculiar brand of American authenticity; it is premised upon a double standard of justice in which the worst of the worst can parade among the public with impunity.
Pitner’s relational argument about words comes to the fore with some wonderful examples. For instance, his discussion of the Dutch word polderen, which has no equivalent in English, reveals a connection to their situation of having to create land out of the North Sea through the use of dams and dikes, and the ever-present reality of the reclamation of that land by the sea. An extraordinary fact about the Netherlands is that, in a land mass half the size of the U.S. state of Maine, the Dutch are able to produce enough food to be the second largest agrarian exporters. Given its size, the U.S. (being the first) is in fact woefully inefficient, despite the mantra of efficiency often being brought up by its propagandists’ rationalizations of capitalism. On page 27, Pitner reflects on the social world a commitment to polderen produced for the Dutch:
Whenever I have been to the Netherlands, I notice that the people keep their curtains open. The monotony of daily life largely remains a communal activity even when you are within your own home. Not all Dutch people live on a polder, but as I pass by and see people inside their homes and they look at me, I meditate on how communal existence seems to come first, and how private space, such as your home, appears to exist as part of a larger communal space. One’s home does not create a private sanctuary apart from the world, but instead creates personal space within a community.
He does not mean that the Netherlands is a paradise. As he adds: “Any society can regress into cultural destruction, but few are built upon it” (28). Not built on cultural destruction, the spirit of cooperation infuses how the Dutch manage to bring the best out of so many people, whether in farming, legislation, or sports, living together on such little space. The U.S., however, has plenty of place, but the dominating ethos of arrogance and greed afford little room for others, and for some members of American society, those heavily invested in the value of cultural destruction, there is never enough room no matter how many people they block and exclude.
Pitner offers a powerful allegory in his chapter, “Waiting for Lucky,” in which he analyzes Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. Most commentaries on this classic exemplar of theater of the absurd focus on the god that never arrives and the effort to construct meaning in a world without gods. But few focus on the enslaved character Lucky, with a rope around his neck as he is dragged about and eventually, in an ironic turn of events, leads his enslaver, Pozzo. Pitner focuses on the unintelligibility of Lucky’s speech and the collective effort to silence him in Act 1, which was followed by Pozzo’s blindness but Lucky’s continued enslavement in Act 2. Illicit appearance and silencing and the presupposition of translatability through ethnocide receive attention in Pitner’s analysis.
A question that comes to mind from that chapter is whether Waiting for Godot would have been different if the characters were female or women or a mixture of women and men. Although the thesis of the importance of constructing meaning would remain, there would perhaps be a temporality of meaning in the form of natality or procreation or the decision to continue that path. Bear in mind there is a production in which Pozzo is played by a Black actor, and Estragon (one of the main interlocutors) is performed by a Latinx one. Although the (paradoxical) point is meaning in the midst of the absurd; there is, given Pitner’s relational argument, a set of political possibilities when an audience from an ethnocidal, white supremacist, and antiblack society views this play. Here, the action, so to speak, would be located more in the audience than on the stage.
Pitner’s analysis of the absurd transcends the reductionism of Afropessimism, a form of thought that has achieved much vogue in academic circles over the past decade. He brings to the fore the absurdity of having to treat false realities as truth by virtue of the violence imposed upon the rest of us by its adherents. Antiblack racism is saturated with false realities, institutional violence, and, as we’ve already seen, apartheid systems of justice in which clearly guilty white people are often held unaccountable for actions that nonwhite peoples would be found guilty and for which they would suffer often extreme forms of punishment.
There are many other elements of this thought-provoking work. Pitner correctly refers to American English to bring home the point that it is not only an English whose speakers confuse its particularity as universal, but also a language devised, in its home-grown semantic framework, for the perpetuation of ethnocide and the evasion of reality. This evasive aspect of American English affects, as well, hegemonic American society’s conception of religion. It boils down to hegemonic religion without spirit, or, more colloquially, religious practices without soul. The discussion of soul in Black communities is spectacular, and it adds to the importance of this book as an antidote to misrepresentations of such communities among Black conservatives and Afropessimists. Black communities are not exemplars of social death. It is hegemonic white American society that is, for the most part, socially dead. Whiteness exemplifies “Geistmord” (roughly, “spirit-murder” or “soul-murder”), a term coined by Pitner (97).
The need for soul-reclamation leads to an existential philosophical conclusion. Ethnocide leads to a commitment of essence preceding existence, which results in a refusal to address reality—even, as we’ve all now experienced at the writing of this reflection, in the face of a deadly pandemic (284).
Pitner’s analysis generates many questions. They include: (1) what about cases of having the language, the correct words, but continuing ethnocide? (2) The neo- and postmodern fascism of Trump and the behavior of the GOP are, after all, mirrored in countries that are not American. Think, for example, of Brazil, Hungary, and India. Would the argument be that those countries lack the proper language, too? (3) To what extent is this problem a function of a rise of Euromodern colonialism, of which “America” is a species?
Regarding the third question, the Dutch and the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway had empires premised on enslavement and capitalist exploitation. The country of New Zealand is named after Zealand in the Netherlands; the country of South Africa was at first a Dutch colony, with Cape Town being a slave center. These were taken over by the British. In the case of South Africa, the Dutch farmers (Boers) were transformed into Afrikaners with a Dutch-based creolized language Afrikaans. The history of the Dutch in Aruba, Botswana, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Surinam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe isn’t pretty, despite the settlers’ history of polderen in the Netherlands and, to some extent, the Scandinavian countries that developed such practices to increase land against the encroaching North Sea. Why are the Dutch of today different from their colonial heirs?
An answer could be in colonialism and its demise. The decline and destruction of most of the Scandinavian and Dutch empires ironically enabled them to become better people. There is a lesson here. Americanism is, in addition to ethnocidal, premised on the notion that the end of American imperialism would mark the end of the world. What many former imperial European countries now know is that life continues after empire. Without a focus on disempowering other peoples, there is room to focus on developing values that empower communities. The efforts of American neofascists and white nationalists are geared toward blocking such possibilities. Given the bad faith that undergirds their efforts, Pitner’s words would not have an impact on them. But, for many of us who continue to wage the fight for a better tomorrow, his words bring insight on some necessary conditions of what, proverbially, needs to be done.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
