(photo credit)

As we learn, words matter very much.   What we call something frames the conversation and removes certain aspects completely from the discussion. Most of us recognize that there is a more truthful description of an actual incident and a less truthful one.  Those who would manipulate public opinion seize the selected description that serves them best.   We can see this daily in the asinine pronouncements of President Pantload and the often convoluted defense of these remarks by his loyalists.   It is an old ploy: call the thing something else and we are no longer talking about the thing that concerns you the most.

Look at the thirty-four words on this marker about an event that took place on April 13, 1873, Easter Sunday that year.  A beautiful example of this.

Context:  this incident took place less than a decade after the end of the Civil War, a war that grew out of a peculiar form of commerce, institutionalized racism and a region’s military defense of chattel slavery based on that racism and commerce.   It is an American war that continues to rage, as a glance around today will confirm.  

The side that lost America’s bloodiest war was forced by the winners to ratify constitutional amendments that would give full citizenship to a race that had until a few years earlier been mostly enslaved.   The former Confederate states were not happy about being forced to do this, but they were compelled to sign so they could get Federal funds to restore the destroyed infrastructure of the South.

After the election of 1872 local whites were enraged that former slaves were again attempting to vote and, worse, were intent on trying to enforce the results of an election their candidate had won.   An armed garrison of blacks guarded the courthouse at the county seat of Grant Parish, to ensure that their candidate was sworn into office.  Local whites, heavily armed, most on horseback, with at least one cannon, besieged the former slaves guarding the voting box.   After the surviving outnumbered blacks surrendered they were taken prisoner.   Dozens of these unarmed prisoners were summarily executed by the mob over the next few hours.

Riot or massacre?  You decide.

Note that three white men were killed.   In a riot.  Then 150 blacks were killed, probably while running amok.  “You know how those people are…” is presumed here, I can almost hear the demur, lowered voice, almost apologetic.  

The passive voice “were slain” is another great touch.  You know, shit happens in a riot.  It is so much more tasteful than “were butchered” or “shot point blank by members of a mob who also tortured many before killing them”.

Then the historical marker concludes, like an incompetent president doubling down, with the punchline, of sorts.

“This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

It is amazing in its bluntness and accuracy, to cite only two ways it is amazing.  Once local mobs could kill blacks with impunity there was no way the former slaves could hope to enjoy the rights of citizenship.   It was probably the Supreme Court decision on the case a few years later, freeing all the white perpetrators/victims of the riot, that marked the end of so-called carpetbag rule, and the compromise that settled the 1876 presidential election, and removed federal troops, that led to the end of enforcement of the new federal laws in the South, the return of “home rule”, but that is a trifle. 

The carpetbaggers were unscrupulous northerners who came down to plunder the helpless south after the war.  There were a bunch of them, no doubt, and some enriched themselves in the manner of ticks gorging on the blood of a noble animal too weakened to resist.  But the “carpetbag misrule” on that plaque refers to the efforts of the Federal government to enforce the constitutional amendments preventing slavery, extending full citizenship and the vote to former slaves.   This “misrule”, enforced with troops and often called “bayonet rule”, included making the former Confederacy do everything it had gone to long and bloody war to prevent:  treat its blacks as equal citizens.  “Misrule” because it is so unfair for the victor of a war to impose its will on those who lost, no matter who fired the first shots.

The fucking issue is still being bitterly fought.  The racism behind it is deeply baked into our society.   Calling it by another name?   Just more of the same.

Bravo, by the way, to the creators of that historical marker.  Making America great again.

An organization, seeking to foster a real conversation about our history of violent racism, lynching in particular, had the funding (from Google) to shoot me a compelling video ad on youtube that led me to explore their website. From their report:

When the era of racial terror and widespread lynching ended in the mid-twentieth century, it left behind a nation and an American South fundamentally altered by decades of systematic community-based violence against black Americans. The effects of the lynching era echoed through the latter half of the twentieth century. African Americans continued to face violent intimidation when they transgressed social boundaries or asserted their civil rights, and the criminal justice system continued to target people of color and victimize African Americans. These legacies have yet to be confronted.

The organization is called The Equal Justice Initiative.  Their project is of crucial importance, in a country being made great again by people who deny our ongoing bloody history, and climate disruption, our 2500% higher rate of mass killing by gun than any other nation and many other horrors that are denied at our peril.   The website is very well done.  The historical section I read is clearly and beautifully written.  

When I was in law school, twenty years ago, a case called U.S. v. Cruikshank was mentioned in a one sentence footnote in the casebook for Constitutional Law.   As I began researching what happened to enforcement of the amendments intended to outlaw slavery, guarantee full citizenship to former slaves and give black men the right to vote, I stumbled on more details about the little known case.   After reading the lower court decisions, and the Supreme Court’s final word, I came to understand that Cruikshank, as much as the aptly named Slaughterhouse cases (which gave a miserly reading of the rights of federal citizenship that would be our law for almost a century), was actually the death knell for the new rights of citizenship for black people in America.

When an organized, torch carrying crowd marched and chanted recently in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the proposed removal of a monument to the slaveholders’ armed rebellion against the U.S.A., the stink of an undiscussed history hung over that procession.  There was the occasional shot of a screaming chap wearing a swastika, a chant about Jews, delivered by the marchers without love or irony, and also those carrying and wearing the symbols of those who enslaved and terrorized blacks.  There was a near century, after the Civil War, of often public lynching that extended to twenty states, walking with these angry white men.

Most people, on many sides, many sides, have a revulsion for the symbols of racist regimes of the past, however little they might actually know about these notorious regimes.  These symbols stand for a time when violent hatred ruled the day.  That’s kind of the point of bringing these potent symbols to a rally.  They are used to rub people’s faces in an easily recognizable worst case scenario for a minority, when the violent racists of the day ruled and the government smiled on the murderers.  

Cruikshank was one of the leaders of a mob of angry whites, defeated Confederates, who swarmed into Colfax Louisiana on Easter Sunday 1873. They came heavily armed, on horseback, with at least one cannon.  The whites were there to see that Negros did not get the final word on the vote, that no Negro take power over any white. They attacked the black Civil War veterans who were guarding the courthouse, defending the county seat of newly renamed Grant Parish after a bitterly contested election won, on black votes, by Republican advocates of black rights.    

It was a slaughter, pure and simple.  As many as fifty black men were killed hours after surrendering.   The whites, who had overwhelming numbers, killed every black they came across, left their corpses rotting on the field on the day Jesus was resurrected and rose up to heaven.  The failed federal prosecution of the perpetrators of what Eric Foner called the worst instance of racial violence of the Reconstruction era   would, more than a century later, become a one sentence footnote in the Constitutional Law casebook. [1]

The federal prosecution over Cruikshank and his comrades was ruled unconstitutional by The Supreme Court.  It said, amid pages of legal analysis that drily took the indictments apart point by point, that the Constitution protected former slaves only from government action– not from the actions of a private mob.   It left enforcement of such crimes up to each individual state to deal with as they saw fit.   The case quietly closed down all federal prosecution of outfits like the Ku Klux Klan.  

The decision was a stinking piece of legalistic cavil, like other racially driven decisions over the years, but you can’t appeal that decision anywhere, of course, even if the Court is demonstrably sympathetic to the former enemies of the U.S.   The ruling in Cruikshank led to all the defendants walking, triumphant as that iconic grinning Southern sheriff with his Red Man chewing tobacco pouch almost a century later, into a long period of unrestrained, often deadly, brutality against former slaves.

Here is a historical marker, put up by the state of Louisiana in 1950, photographed by Billy Hathorn (photo credit here). 

At the end of the twentieth century only an enterprising law student with an overriding interest in history could find out anything more about the case, about the then largely unknown Colfax massacre, about any of this shit.  As we march along in the twenty-first century, this is the kind of history we need to be learning from together. This website is an excellent tool for learning.

As the director of the Equal Justice Initiative writes:  

We cannot heal the deep wounds inflicted during the era of racial terrorism until we tell the truth about it.

True dat, as my father would say.

[1]  how’s this for a footnote?  

Opposition among white Democrats to suffrage for blacks resulted in 1,081 political murders from April to November 1868. Almost all of the victims were black, and some of the whites who were killed were Republicans.

source

In our Free Market, where unfettered competition (LOL) for higher profits is the only order of business, those corporations who manipulate their customer base the best are the most successful.   If sharks are in charge of all public policy, it is not surprising their only priority will be meat.   If maximizing their supply of meat depends on intimate knowledge of the habits of those they eat, they will get that competitive edge, whatever it takes.   Data collection and sophisticated data crunching are essential to wholesale meat-eating in our complex, digital world.  

The genius of that twat who invented Facebook, for example, was to combine the essential loneliness of disconnected people, their hunger for connection, and a seamless way to harvest the essential data and psychological profiles user-expressed preferences provide.  This valuable data can then be sold to shrewd data-mining operators.  No wonder the fine fellow is a multi-billionaire.  The valuable real-time marketing research information revealed to a company like Facebook is incredibly useful commercially and politically, as the recent American presidential election demonstrated.

Now we come to Cambridge Analytica, a company that specializes in data-driven results, commercial and political.  From its inception it engaged in psyops, psychological warfare, using whatever means were necessary to win hearts and minds to persuade the persuadable towards the wishes of their clients.  It is owned by reclusive billionaire and Trump savior Robert Mercer, no slouch in data analysis himself.  The company began with a huge cache of psychological user profiles obtained from Facebook.  As an article in the Guardian states, in connection to Cambridge Analytica’s major role in determining the outcome of the Brexit vote:

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.    source

From that same article, a description of the company’s mission, by an ex-employee:

“Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

If you want to throw up in your mouth a little, all you need to do is read this Wikipedia entry.   It is not long, but it is perfectly chilling.  I’ve never read a Wiki more horrifying.   Then, if you want a real shiver of horror, click here.   All you need to do is click “political” on the home page, right there next to “commercial” and look at the first screen that pops up.  I watched the images on that screen loop for a minute, words failing me, unable to click any further.  As a service to my reader(s) I revisited the site.  A click-through of the CA Political menu, accessed through the three bars top right, was grimly rewarding. 

Data drives all we do, yo.  Persuasion vs. Manipulation– who is to really say?  Isn’t it really a matter of opinion?   Opinion is as American as apple pie and a bloated military budget.   “Manipulate” is such a poisoned and judgmental word.   Is it even against the law to manipulate people?  If so, a lot of our largest, most lucrative businesses would have to close shop. LOL!

Secretive billionaire computer genius Robert Mercer bought the company a few years ago, fair enough.   Oh yeah, his friend Steve Bannon partially owns Cambridge Analytica, or owned it, or at the very least was until recently vice president of the sophisticated propaganda machine– at any rate, he disclosed $125,333 in income from the firm last year.  And Kellyanne Conway’s consulting firm did work for Cambridge Analytica in 2016.  The company is now reportedly getting military contracts from the Department of Defense under Trump.   Yeah, so what?  Your point is?