This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me…
The opening lines from Woodie Guthrie’s iconic song “This Land Is Your Land” challenges all people upon this land at this critical juncture to ask ourselves whether these inspiring words truly reflect an overarching but yet-to-be realized mission statement of the United States, or whether they simply testify to Woody’s embrace of the propagandist pablum we are fed and which dominant elites on this land promote around the world.
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From the day European explorers and so-called “settlers” (a.k.a. land thieves who violently displaced and committed genocidal slaughter of native peoples) stepped foot on this land, dominant Protestant Anglo-Saxons set rigid parameters defining who was to be included as “my” on this land.
In her pioneer book, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, Suzanne Pharr describes a series of elements she finds common to the multiple forms of oppression. Such elements include what she refers to as a “defined norm” and a “lack of prior claim,” among many others.
Pharr explains a “defined norm” as “a standard of rightness and often of righteousness wherein all others are judged in relation to it. This norm must be backed up with institutional power, economic power, and both institutional and individual violence.”
“The defined norm manages to maintain its power and control,” Pharr adds, by an element or system stating a “lack of prior claim.”
This, according to Pharr, “means that if you weren’t there when the original document [the Torah, the Christian Testaments, the Qur’an, national Constitutions, corporate founding documents, for example] was written, or when the organization was first created,” she wrote, “then you have no right to inclusion….Those who seek their rights, who seek inclusion, who seek to control their own lives instead of having their lives controlled are the people who fall outside the norm….They are the Other.”
In the original and unamended version of the U.S. Constitution, for example — since only European-heritage male landowners had the right to vote — all Others, including women and people of color (those outside the defined norm and who lacked prior claim) had to fight long and difficult battles against strong forces to gain access to the voting booth, often under the threat of and actual violence inflicted against them.
In fact, the framers of the U.S. Constitution constructed enslaved Africans as constituting only three-fifths of a full human being, for census purposes.
Some who continue to oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples assert that this is outside the defined norm, lacks prior claim, and would, therefore, undermine the sanctity of marriage, possibly leading to the destruction of society using religious sanctions as their justification.
When patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems — those which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girl’s oppression and the oppression of those who transgress sexuality — gender-based boundaries become inevitable.
Those in power in the United States have excluded trans and intersex people from the category of “defined norms” by viewing trans and intersex people as the Other. Founding national and institutional policy documents have likewise excluded trans and intersex peoples’ civil and human rights from a prior claim.
A spate of state legislatures either have passed or have considered passing laws prohibiting trans (and by implication, intersex) people from entering public restroom facilities that conform to their gender identities and expressions — even though those may differ from the sex assigned to them on their birth certificates.
With the recent wave of brutal mass terrorist murders on this land targeting Latinx, black, Asian, and LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Jews, and Sikhs, several of the perpetrators gained their inspiration and justification from the long-standing ideological underpinning of patriarchal Christian white supremacy.
People of goodwill, people who adhere to the idea that “all people are created equal,” people who abide by Woody Guthrie’s vision that “this land was made for you and me” have reacted with shock, grief, and anger to the domestic terrorism overtaking this land.
We place blame on Christian white nationalism, the groups and individuals, and a former president who consistently promotes hatred and divisions, who targets people as “invaders,” “criminals,” “rapists,” and “breeders” overtaking this land and robbing its “good citizens” of their livelihoods.
Ironically, not having any grounding in history, Trump couldn’t possibly understand that we, the people of the United States of America, were the actual invaders trumping (pun intended) up a war to confiscate land from the proud Mexican people.
Trump’s latest trumped-up war against all Latinx people, whether U.S. citizens or not, represents this former president’s cynical reelection strategy to instill fear and loathing, to divide and conquer – a strategy with deadly consequences.
It is easy for anyone who hasn’t hidden under the rock of Fox Propaganda Network for the past nine years to direct this blame outward from Donald Trump onto the Christian white nationalists he winks and nods toward to inspire and condone.
This blame is obvious. This blame is clear. This blame is justified.
But what about the remainder of white people on this land? What part do we play in perpetuating the defined norm of white supremacy? How do we maintain the notion of a lack of prior claim to equality of opportunity and to human dignity for anyone other than this mythical “original” white American?
We must remember that the very definition of what it means to be “white” has changed and expanded since the Pilgrims deboarded the Mayflower. They severely limited what we call “white” today as Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The category within their defined norm excluded everyone else, including Anglo-Saxon Catholics and Quakers who they Othered.
This socially constructed notion we call “race” — with its inextricably linked privileges and restrictions based on individuals’ assigned “race” — must be seen, first, in the contexts of place and time, and secondly, it needs to be charted along a wide continuum, and not as polar opposites within a binary frame.
Though we can never fully quantify privilege, by discarding the bifurcated polar perspective while charting privilege along a continuum considering context and identity intersectionalities, we will come to a fuller and deeper awareness of the issues of power and privilege, marginalization, and oppression as we work toward a more socially just society and world.
Down the line of generations that came after the Pilgrims, once circumscribed to the ranks of the marginalized non-white “races,” other European-heritage people — like Irish, Italian, Polish, Greek, and Slavic people — fought their way toward the “white” defined norm side of the racial continuum.
Ashkenazim (western and eastern European-heritage Jews) began to be seen as “white” by some European-heritage Christians only after World War II. Today, many Ashkenazim remain largely classified as “not fully” white in many quarters.
When is the last time we European-heritage residents took a long look inward, directing our scrutiny and even our blame upon ourselves and understanding, truly and seriously understanding, the privileges we receive from our white skin and ethnic backgrounds stemming from the deeply entrenched legacy of racism?
Yes, my ancestors first stepped upon this land well after the institution of slavery had been abolished. As Jews, my family has been told to “go home” or “go back to Israel where you belong.”
Yes, neo-Nazi white supremacists place me in the same category as people of color as “mud” people who are not fully human. And yes, people have thrown pennies at me and told me to my face that I will go to Hell because I do not believe in Jesus “as my personal savior.”
By some people in the United States today, I am defined on the “white” side of the massive racial continuum. Therefore, as another Ashkenazim, a friend of mine states, “I am white enough to have white privilege.”
I am responsible for the marginalization of anyone and any group whenever I coast on my white privilege or when I discount its effect on my life outcomes. I am also responsible when I minimize the degree and effect of racism upon racially minoritized people.
It is so easy and completely appropriate to define Donald Trump as a racist Christian white supremacist. It is, however, so much more difficult while posing a narcissistic injury to consider the ways we as white people contribute to the entrenched system of racism, a system planted in the soil as fertilizer along with the crops of over 400 years ago.
As Senator Cory Booker stated at Emanuel AME Church in Charlottesville a few years ago during a speech on white supremacy, “The question is not who is and who is not a racist. The question is who is and who is not doing something about it.”
Even prior to the Pilgrims, racism was dumped onto this land by Christopher Columbus and his crew. It has overtaken and strangled the country more than the fast-growing Kudzu plant (Pueraria montana) covering and devouring everything in its way. Unlike the deadly Kudzu that grips only the South, racism attacks the soul of the entire nation.
Woody Guthrie’s anthem certainly does not represent the United States at this critical juncture, or throughout our history. Woody, though, constructed a platform on which he placed a beacon to guide a nation he loved toward a path of righteousness the likes of which the world has yet to realize.
The next step on our path is to expand the defined norm of “American” to embrace you and me.
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