Oak Creek and the End of Civil Society
by Anoop Mirpuri | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The media’s coverage of the murderous shooting rampage at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin has garnered a significant amount of well-deserved criticism. From the tendency to explain the killings as “senseless” and “random,” to the unwillingness of the media to pay attention at all, we have witnessed a massive failure by those we rely on to frame and contextualize events that, however tragic they are, define us.
In a thoughtful piece in The New Yorker blog, Naunihal Singh, comparing Oak Creek to the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado, adroitly points out the media’s unwillingness to treat Oak Creek as “a tragedy for all Americans.” What is it that has made Oak Creek less important to the public? Why have Americans understood the shootings as something that happened to “other people” rather than “us”?
On one level, at least, we know the answer (though we have difficulty admitting it). Sikhs are thought of as “foreign.” Most Americans cannot even say what Sikhism is, much less differentiate someone who identifies as Sikh from those of other religious and cultural traditions in South Asia and the Middle East. As many have pointed out, in a society that grounds its supposed “exceptionalism” on the premise of multicultural inclusiveness, this treatment should give us pause.
However, Singh argues that the public’s failure to treat the Oak Creek shootings as a tragedy for all Americans was not a foregone conclusion. I like to think he is right, and he offers a variety of narrative framings that could have made Oak Creek into a powerful story that touched the lives of all of us. But if the story of Oak Creek has been “ghettoized” as an event that affects a small, unremarkable group, rather than the nation as a whole, it’s not only because the victims are viewed as “foreign.” As Vijay Prashad has powerfully argued, the unpleasant fact behind this claim is that certain lives are simply valued less than others. Racialized embodiment is a powerful thing.
But it might just be the case that understanding our response to Oak Creek has as much (if not more) to do with our relation to the shooter—Wade Michael Page—as it does with the victims. In today’s America, as counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s much more likely that the public would come to identify with the Sikh victims than with Page—and this, precisely, is what is at issue. It’s the treatment of Page as, in a sense, “foreign,” that disallows us from seeing Oak Creek for what it is. Singh argues that the fact that Page was an avid white supremacist could function as the central point in a narrative that unites multicultural America against those elements of hate and intolerance that threaten civil society.
But I want to question whether this is really the narrative of Oak Creek that we need. And I’m questioning it because it is, at its root, dishonest. It asks us to disidentify with Page, to treat him as something other than us. In attempting to unite Americans against terrorism perpetrated by those committed to hate and intolerance, treating Page as someone that opposes everything that America stands for denies the long and well-established tradition of “domestic” terrorism native to our own soil. It absolves us of any connection to Page and any responsibility for the murders. Page was a madman, an aberration, it tells us. Which is to say that refusing to recognize the American roots of these murders cuts both ways: it may foster a greater identification with the Sikh victims, but it is just as likely to facilitate a blindness as to who we really are as Americans and how a shooting like this could have happened in the first place.
In order to really recognize Oak Creek as a tragedy for all Americans, we might have to do something far more dangerous to our collective psyche than simply integrate the shootings and their protagonists into pre-arranged narrative of “friends” and “enemy.” This isn’t just about making the argument that Sikhs are us. Equally important—even more important if we are to understand the shootings as anything other than “random,” “senseless”—is to recognize Wade Page as one of us. To do so would force us to place this horrific event within a singular history of American racial violence and domestic terrorism, which began with the Indian wars and the slave trade, but continued and morphed into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a repertory of tactics intended to draw the boundaries of civil society and designate those who may be abandoned to its outside: lynching, race riots, firebombing, vigilante “border control,” the neighborhood watch, stop and frisk, and mass incarceration.
The point is that recognizing this long history of terror and exclusion forces us to view civil society as a privileged domain, the protection of which has facilitated literally unspeakable violence, even as it functions ideologically as that realm of inclusion that guarantees peace and order.
What critical commentary on Oak Creek has so far failed to recognize is that this tragedy is symptomatic of how central the discourse of disavowal is to American life. To be more specific: the disavowal of racism. (What’s remarkable is that we still need to make enormous efforts to say the word racism and defend its usage in a society obsessed with race, racism, and with their (nominal) eradication.) Put differently, what our treatment of Oak Creek bespeaks is that Americans need to use all their effort to deny the persistence of white supremacy just to get on with their everyday lives. This is especially revealing, not only of the paucity and poverty of American cultural discourse, but of the extent to which struggles against racism across the twentieth century have impacted the collective psyche of modern Americans.
To treat Oak Creek as a "tragedy for all Americans" would require things that Americans are just not willing to do. Such as, first, recognize that the power of racism is rooted in white supremacy—as opposed to viewing whites as the victims of racism, which has been the dominant racial narrative at least since Nixon’s “silent majority.” But perhaps even more jarring to our sense of ourselves, it would also require us to recognize the centrality of deadly violence to the modern history of whiteness, on this continent and beyond. Which is to say that whiteness—the domain where modern civil society has always been most developed, if not always “real”—has been created and recreated not just through law, custom, and policy, but precisely through violence.
To put it differently, it’s not so much that our collective failed response to the tragedy at Oak Creek is evidence of racism (though I can find no other word to explain the public’s inability to treat the victims as worthy of mourning). As Nikhil Singh has trenchantly arguedin a different context, equally insidious, but more difficult to grasp, is the racism at the root of our efforts to purge American history of racial violence.
What is clear is that these shootings tear at the delicate threads holding together our very idea of civil society. They challenge the basic assumptions of America’s commitment to a world order free from old world stigmas of racial difference and hierarchy, a commitment that supposedly undergirds our military and economic adventurism around the planet. Most of all, they remind us of who we are and where we come from. To borrow from David Theo Goldberg, events such as Oak Creek make us uncomfortable because they remind us “that the histories of racisms are those of terror and death, of death’s production, of terror and death in the name of identity and identification.” It is this deep-seated fear of confronting who we are that most of all explains the failure of our response to Oak Creek, the enormous effort to not talk about the killings, and to treat all the actors in the tragic drama as ultimately different from us.
As mass shootings in America (and now Europe) continue to occur, we desperately need to ask ourselves about the future of civil society. It’s a concept that has always been put into question by those that have not had the advantage of enjoying its privileges. As Frank Wilderson reminds us, in the U.S., civil society for black people has more often functioned as a “state of emergency.” In the classic book, Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall described the reformation of civil society in Britain and the U.S. in the early 1970s in response to major economic changes that began to tear at the fabric of the postwar Keynesian state. Deindustrialization was quickly consigning the black working class to economic redundancy, just as the civil rights platform was shifting from legal to economic justice. In the face of these challenges, conservative politicians based their appeal to far narrower constituency, an appeal that was based on the exclusion of those deemed unworthy, who (thanks to barely concealed racial coding) quickly came to be understood as illegitimately dependent on the government, parasites on its “hardworking” (read, white) tax base.
The state soon thereafter was figured as favoring blacks (indeed, as black in its corruption, and corrupted by blackness), even as African Americans communities were being devastated by the most massive prison-building project in the history of the world. Over the past thirty years, we have effectively and forcibly removed from society millions of people that have represented a threat to the ability of a few thousand people to accumulate capital at an alarming and destructive rate. The level of inequality that currently divides society is the fallout of thirty years of deliberate efforts to privatize political capacity and eviscerate the government’s capability to provide for basic human welfare. As a result, even the pretense of democratic accountability is understood by large swaths of the populace as a sham.
This is a familiar story, as is the casual xenophobia of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment such a society has helped bring about. Less discussed is the impact that anti-statist policy, the gutting of state resources in Iraq and Afghanistan, the militarization of urban policing, and mass-incarceration have all had—on the idea of civil society, not to mention its actual existence. Are we really getting to the point when the possibility of civilian life is now in question (unless one has the privilege of living in a fortified enclave)? Indeed, when civil society is threatened to the extent that it is now, I wonder if any of us can still have the claim to be civilians in the most elementary sense: having the status of being protected from violence. Aurora and Oak Creek represent just the most visible manifestations of what people experience every single dayin communities all over America.
To be clear, I’m arguing that the disavowal of racism has been critical to making civil society into a kind of simulacrum, a powerful process that has ironically overseen the narrowing of the field of those protected by its ambit. Until we recognize that not only is Oak Creek is a tragedy for all Americans, but that we are and have always been its perpetrators, the promise of civil society will continue to function as the handmaiden of racial violence, rather than a possible reality that acts as a bulwark against such violence. And whatever flaws in its conception, and exclusions it harbors, that reality is worth fighting for.
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Anoop Mirpuriis Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University.
