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First installment of American history through a Lumbee lens: Race and Racism.(Caveat: I didn’t come to comfort the afflicted. I came to afflict the comfortable. I’m not here to explain it. Don’t @ me if you don’t read.) #twitterstorians y’all need this too. Examine yourselves.
Anti-Blackness. Homophobia. It’s real in Indian Country. People like @TheRedNation_ @ndncollective @_IllumiNatives are here to fight it, with art, protest, mutual aid and in other forms. Follow them. Here’s some context:
A letter to the editor published by several N.C. newspapers in Robeson, Cumberland, and Scotland Counties this past week: https://www.robesonian.com/opinion/letters/135718/behavior-of-lumbees-at-friday-protest-disappoints
@NickA_Martin wrote a good analysis for @newrepublic that quotes me (
Nick) https://newrepublic.com/article/158294/reckoning-anti-blackness-indian-country
Nick) https://newrepublic.com/article/158294/reckoning-anti-blackness-indian-country
Many Lumbees will say that there’s a “good reason” for anti-blackness. Some say that Blacks act racist against us. Others say it’s colonialism’s fault. Both arguments are decontextualized ways of blaming someone else for your own racist views. News flash: doing that is racist.
If you don’t understand why it’s racist, go read @DrIbram, or Zora Neal’s Hurston for God’s sake. Follow @BreeNewsome. Pick up some Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, John Trudell, or Vine Deloria. Or @KimTallBear @ZoeSTodd @readkropotkin.
Including my essay, “Making Christianity Sing,” published in 2002 in Confounding the Color Line (ed @Pescador505), I’ve been researching/writing about what Native and Black cultures owe each other for over 20 years. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803261945/
Before that, I made a film about Lumbee gospel music that premiered @sundancefest in 1998. Much of the blowback I got for that work came from Blacks who felt Lumbees were Black pretending to be Indian and stealing Black rhythm for White songs.
#holybinary Batman! Culture, community, and art don’t work that way. To pretend otherwise is a double standard, where Black and White Americans get to enjoy cultural innovation but Natives don’t. I’ve seen a certain kind of resurgence in that point of view recently.
Someone is always ready to step up and say “but Lumbees are really Black”—whites, Blacks, other Natives. This week, here’s a comment left by a film watcher, that implies this perspective is alive & well:
The fact that Lumbees or any other tribe have Black ancestors does not make us “Black Indians.” We are Indigenous. Black or White Americans’ Indigenous ancestors don’t make them Indigenous, a fact all too painfully established in the Democratic presidential primary.
If you still don’t get that, you also might not get that Indigenous people have a sovereign right to be the experts on our own lives. #twitterstorians, take all the time you need with this. I’ll be here when you get back.
Why are Lumbees Indigenous, and not Black, or mixed-race? Don’t get me started on the hypocrisies of this question. But the main answer is that Indigeneity in the US is a political identity (not exclusive from it as a racial or cultural identity). Go read @kbruyneel
As a political community, Lumbees predate the existence of the United States, and if you don’t understand what that means, go read some Indian Law. That’s what makes any Indigenous community Indigenous in the screwed up colonial context we live in, and Lumbees are no exception.
Speaking for myself and my heritage, I don’t know any stories about my Black or White ancestors. See @surlybassey for a different perspective https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/opinion/sunday/dna-ancestry-test.html
Ive published 300000+ words about how Indigenous ancestry and identity is more about what we know of our relatives than our DNA or genealogy. Identity is related to, not beholden to, ideas about the one drop rule. We are all implicated in this, & many of us participate in it.
Positioning any Native community within a binary constructed by colonizers to support their power hierarchy, and deny our legitimate political entities, is violence. You are practicing anti-Black racism and settler colonialism if you continue to put Natives in a binary.
If you are scrutinizing Native skin colors, hair textures, nose shape, etc to judge our cultural authenticity you are participating in anti-Black racism. If you are using other metrics, like blood quantum, language, or religion, you are also participating in anti-Black racism.
My chapter in this book, and the other chapters (ed @JeaniOBrien et al) can get you started on what’s wrong with race as an exclusive identity category https://uncpress.org/book/9781469602165/recognition-sovereignty-struggles-and-indigenous-rights-in-the-united-states/
Individuals who are both Black and Indigenous have their own necessary stories to tell. But if you’re at all serious about anti-racism then you must pay attention to nuances of individual and tribal national identities. see @IndianCountry: https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/what-does-it-mean-to-be-black-and-native-in-2020-T8eoAtse606ZYCTODPX1og
#twitterstorians You will only grasp the fullness of the impact race has had on US society when you read Indigenous Hisotry. It’s a twisted, distorted journey that @PainterNell & many others have examined. Here’s me and @profblmkelley talking about it: https://southernfutures.unc.edu/kelley-lowery/
Finally, here’s a book that might be helpful and pretty much sums up the situation to the best of my ability, with many many thanks to my colleagues in #criticalethnicstudies like @DrJenHo @KiaLCaldwell @agoldste & more for thinking with me https://uncpress.org/book/9780807871119/lumbee-indians-in-the-jim-crow-south/
