This book by anthropologist/archeologist Erin Kimmerle relates her authorized official investigations at the site of the Dozier School, a “reform school” in Florida’s panhandle, operating from 1900 to 2011. Actually a prison. Incarcerating thousands of boys, sentenced for mostly minor notional offenses, some as young as five, mostly Black.
“Throwaways” they’ve been called. Dozier was a nightmare world of violence and abuse. Its infamous “White House” a beating shack. Other victims were immured for weeks in tiny bleak isolation cells. It didn’t take much in the way of “misbehavior” to incur such drastic punishment.
Unsurprisingly, many boys tried to escape; usually recaptured, with severe repercussions. Authorities acknowledged 31 bodies buried on the premises, though mostly unidentified, with scanty records. Kimmerle, after surmounting a gauntlet of obstruction against her work, ultimately found 55 burials.
In such a place, some discipline, maybe even corporal punishment, would be expected. But what happened at Dozier could only have been sheer sadistic cruelty, for its own sake.
After all, these were mostly Black kids.
No better than animals, to the white men staffing Dozier. But in such cases, I always think not even animals should suffer like that.
Kimmerle has surprisingly little to say about sexual abuse. She does relate one head of the school singling out particular boys. But maybe such things are harder to be clear about.
There’s also only one vague mention of anyone (apart from inmates!) ever charged with crimes at Dozier. The outcome of those few cases isn’t stated.
The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed “involuntary servitude,” except as part of punishment for crimes. The South used this loophole to establish a pervasive crypto-slavery system, charging Black men with dubious offenses to force them into brutal unpaid work. Dozier was part of this, its boys put to work or sent out for it. All part of the Jim Crow regime to keep Blacks “in their place” — as reviled subhuman non-citizens whose very existence was barely tolerated — a “place” often enforced by terror. That was the point of lynchings. A victim’s guilt or innocence was beside the point.
Dozier’s horrors couldn’t be buried with all those bodies. Many inmates did emerge alive and spoke out. Over the decades, numerous official inquiries all resulted in whitewash.
Even after Dozier’s closure, Kimmerle shows, local sentiment and officialdom were hostile toward any exposure of the truth. A depressingly familiar syndrome. I was reminded of Britain’s recent Post Office scandal — faulty accounting software resulted in legions of local postmasters falsely prosecuted for theft. For years the bureaucracy refused to acknowledge anything wrong with this picture.*
In Dozier’s case, the unwillingness of locals to see anything amiss was compounded by racism. Victim advocates were viewed as just troublemakers with bad motives, racial attitudes pervading the whole picture.
Not so long ago, we fancied our racial divide was healing. With a Black president even. Turned out that enflamed matters — whites being okay with Black advancement, but only up to a point. Now many feel threatened. Trump has nakedly played to this and exacerbated it. Making his re-election all the more societally destructive.
The State of Florida eventually officially acknowledged the epic wrong that was Dozier, trying to make some amends. One legislative enactment along such lines passed the State House of Representatives 114 to 3. Among the three dissenters was then-member Matt Gaetz.
* * *
Kimmerle made great efforts not only to find burials but then to identify whose. Generally the bodies had been interred unceremoniously, hence with little left to exhume. But the team was able to extract DNA even from bone fragments and thereby identify many victims. Amazing modern science.
Much of the book concerns this work. There was a lot of hand-wringing over what to do with the unidentifiable remains, with consensus that they couldn’t just be reburied onsite. Some that were identified were sent to their families, enabling re-interments and some sort of “closure.” Boys dying at Dozier many decades before had not been forgotten. Loving familial bonds, the intensity of such human attachments, ennobles us.
Yet, though we are embodied in our physical selves while alive, afterward the dead corporeal remains should lose meaning. Our connections to our dead reside in our hearts and minds, our remembrance, not in their disintegrated bones.
Those families already knew, basically, what had befallen their kin. Receiving a box of remains really adds nothing. I think we’re too fixated on such physicality, it’s a kind of superstition.
Am I too rational? Early painters sometimes inserted skulls in still lifes, called “Memento Mori,” reminders we must die. I am indeed often reminded that I will someday be a skull and bones — and even those will melt away. Yet my existence will already have ended — absolutely. What happens to my bones thereafter can be no concern to me. Nor should it be to anyone else.
Coming to grips with this is a great challenge of life.
*I’ve written about this: https://rationaloptimist.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/the-british-post-office-scandal-how-not-to-handle-one/
Obama had just been elected. The symbolic import seemed huge: we were “choosing a civic father, a tribal leader.” And “in a nation where bloody battles once raged over blacks merely voting, a black presidency has arrived in peace and goodwill.”
Instead I was always impressed by the friendly decency of most blacks toward whites. If white society had, as I believed, done much toward reconciliation, blacks had done more. Again I quote Kimberly Jones: we’re lucky they seek only equality, not revenge. Their goodwill has outstripped that of whites.
And for people having that skin, that’s a very big fact of life. They might shrug off the racism of assholes, but it’s another matter when it’s guys who can commit violence against you with near impunity under color of law. (Of course that’s a threat to us all, but blacks bear its brunt.)
Whites claiming color-blindness is a cliché. But experiments have shown that most harbor unconscious negativity toward black faces vis-a-vis whites. Even blacks themselves do.
Instead, that disadvantage is mostly aggravated by rotten schooling for blacks.
Reparations for slavery is becoming part of the “progressive” full Monty that Democratic presidential candidates must endorse. It’s a terrible idea.
But here it’s unavoidable.
Look at Native Americans. And how about women, also seriously oppressed and denied rights in past times? Why not reparations for descendants of all those women?
It is also true that many whites take for granted their “white privilege” — exemption from a lot of crap non-whites experience. For this some feel “white guilt.” However, the concept of guilt should require some causal responsibility. Most whites today have done nothing wrong to feel guilty for. Certainly not to be punished for.
It’s argued that reparations would be a way to give recognition to what blacks have suffered. But their feelings are not the beginning and the end of the matter. Indeed, to the contrary, a big part of the problem is what white people feel toward them. If we want whites to stop being racist, is reparations the right answer? If we really want to heal our nation’s wounds from slavery and racism, wouldn’t reparations enflame those wounds? Many would see reparations as an injustice, and for the reasons I’ve suggested, they’d have a plausible argument. The issue would be disastrously divisive. We already have a big problem of white racial antagonism and resentment. Just wait till reparations are enacted.
If Democrats truly want to achieve a better, more just nation, the main thing they can do right now is to ensure getting rid of the racist-in-chief.
Her mother subsists running a humble boarding house. Teenaged Sunja is pursued, and impregnated, by businessman Koh Hansu. She vaguely expects marriage; but surprise surprise, he already has a wife back in Japan.
Both eventually wind up running pachinko parlors; pachinko is a pinball-like game very popular in Japan.
But what really prompts me to write is Noa’s story. (BIG SPOILER ALERT) He didn’t know Koh Hansu was his real father. Koh reappears, now quite wealthy, as Noa’s benefactor, financing his much coveted university education. Noa and his mother Sunja are resistent, but accept Koh’s largesse. But then Noa’s girlfriend meets Koh, sees the resemblance, and taunts Noa with the obvious. Also that Koh must be a yakuza— a gangster.*
It’s the heart of racism. The notion that all members of some group are birds of a feather, sharing some (stereotyped) characteristics. As vividly depicted in this book, where the antipathy of Japanese toward “those people” (Koreans) is a constant.
So Noa’s human identity was not dictated by his father’s gangsterhood. His blood was no more bad than anyone else’s. It was up to him to shape his own life. And, even if there were gangster genes inherited from his father (a dubious idea), those genes would not anyway determine his own character, which would still be his to create.
Liberals oppose the death penalty. They’re really not even comfortable with the idea of punishment — “an eye for an eye makes the world blind.” Instead, forgiveness, rehabilitation, and redemption are watchwords.
Northam acknowledges as much. But is defenestration, the maximum penalty, appropriate? What of all he’s done since then for racial progress and advancing the interests of people of color? Does one decades-old picture trump everything? Where is the sense, the proportionality, the justice, in reducing a man’s entire life to literally this one photo?
Republicans bray for Northam’s head while their own Steve King, who recently defended “white supremacy” still sits in Congress — and their king of race-baiting sits in the White House.
How is this not exactly the kind of McCarthyism whose denunciation the left has worn as a badge of honor for six decades? They still lionize its victims — people blacklisted and unable to work because of their political opinions. Isn’t that exactly what they themselves did to Larry Summers and Brendan Eich? (But of course repression of the left is a dastardly crime. Repression by the left is all good.)
And there he sits grinning and preening in the White House — this monster of depravity in every aspect of his existence — having the supreme shamelessness to tweet “Unforgivable!” about Northam.
Omarosa, in her book, tells of asking Steve Bannon whether it’s true that he’s a racist. “No,” he answered. “The same way you are a proud African-American woman, I am a proud white man. What’s the difference between my pride and your pride?”
The central fact of that relationship is the long past history of blacks, as a people, inferiorized and suffering at the hands of whites. Black pride is an aspect of rising above all that. Like Jewish pride at overcoming all that Jews have suffered. If you’re not Jewish, being proud of your non-Jewishness would equate to anti-semitism. Likewise, white pride can only be understood vis-a-vis non-whites, setting oneself against them rather than for something. It’s negative rather than positive; a rejection of racial amity. It has the odor of burning crosses.
White pride, in fact, has the odor of burning flesh. Of the thousands of innocent human beings lynched, often hideously mutilated, burned alive, to keep blacks terrorized “in their place.” I don’t think American white southerners have a noble past history to memorialize and take pride in. It’s a vile history requiring instead atonement.
Mitch Landrieu was mayor of New Orleans, 2010-18. In 2015 he started the process of removing Confederate monuments. Landrieu expected opposition, but its ferocity surprised him. Such was the violence and intimidation that it was a big problem even getting contractors to do the work. Statue removal became something of a military operation.
The book isn’t only about the statues. It tells Landrieu’s life story. He became mayor in 2010, five years after Hurricane Katrina. His predecessor, Ray (“chocolate city”) Nagin was corrupt and incompetent; the recovery was a shambles. Thus Landrieu came into office with huge challenges. What he’s achieved testifies to the can-do spirit that’s so central to America’s story.
The canard is that statue-removers are trying to “erase history.” But ironically it’s the statue-lovers doing exactly that. Landrieu gives us a history lesson.
That is the context for the erection of these “Lost Cause” monuments. They came in two waves: one circa 1900 when Jim Crow was getting established, and later during the civil rights era. In both cases the aim was to strut whites’ unrepentance and rub it especially into black faces, to keep them “in their place.” These were white supremacy monuments. Statues of traitors.
The statues, in New Orleans, and many other southern locales, did come down.
But, as Green noted, slaves had been extremely valuable property, and taking it away left some angry people. When federal troops departed the South in 1877, the pushback came, with whites using violence to terrorize and subjugate blacks. Black voting largely ended.
In Green’s view, though, pushback now took the form of heightened emphasis on policing and criminal justice (Nixon’s “law and order” theme), with the war on drugs ramped up. In practice it was a war on black communities, disproportionally affected, and devastated by the mass incarceration of their inhabitants.
Electing Trump was certainly a manifestation of their pushback. His slogan really meant make America white again. He’s brought white rage out of the closet, legitimizing it. Meantime, Republicans have undertaken voter suppression efforts targeted particularly at blacks, to prevent another Obama being elected.
Last May I wrote a blog post, “
And in the question period, I said, “If I were a Martian hearing your talk, I’d be very puzzled by something: the fact that Obama was elected, even though, as he himself said, he was actually black before the election.” (He was re-elected, too, while black.)
Every day more racists die than are born.
It’s called “cultural appropriation” and it’s the newest gambit of politically correct grievance agitprop, sticking its finger in the eye of freedom of expression. As usual, it’s not enough for these totalitarians to argue their position. No, contrary opinions must be silenced and even punished.
Is book burning next? At least they can’t burn my blog. (Maybe they’ll attack it with malware.)
At one time, we had minstrel shows, Jemimas, and Sambos. Maybe that was “cultural appropriation,” mocking, demeaning, dehumanizing people. And maybe if that Emmett Till picture was painted by a Klansman, that would be different. But surely we’re not talking about anything of that kind now.
Pogroms, lynchings, ethnic cleansing, genocides, all result from people being otherized.
The Rational Pessimist 
