I’m required to remain calm. Here, where I live in the Midwest, it wouldn’t necessarily be the case if I were white. But staying “calm” when you’re being punched and kicked by police or verbally accosted is equivalent to being asked to remain still while the violence happens - to you. It’s the plight of those who don’t control the narrative.

I was looking forward to reading Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland in this time of the COVID-19 Pandemic. There is only so much COVID-19 news anyone person can absorb in a day. Everywhere you look in these last couple of months, some newspaper, magazine, or journal has offered lists of reading suggestions. Old classics and new titles. This Cold Heaven was published in 2001.

So I ordered the book and when it arrived, began reading it enthusiastically because its setting is Greenland. That’s the land our Dear Leader sought to purchase from Denmark. As if Greenland were a commodity, on sale. Never mind the fact that it’s inhabited predominantly by the Inuit people who, for thousands of years, have called Greenland home.

And that’s why I wanted to read about any place that isn’t where our Dear Leader resides.

There’s a good amount of history about Greenland’s inhabitants and their lifestyle, including that history of the European exiled to the land, Eric the Red and his son, Leif. The clever men advertised the land as awash in green. Everywhere green. And the lie worked to lure other Europeans to son him and son in their “lonely exile.”

Ehrlich refers to the “grotesque practice” that developed around 1576 when Martin Frobisher orders his crew to kidnap an Inuit kayaker. The Inuit was taken to England along, with two others where, shortly after, he died.

By 1860, writes Ehrlich, thirty Eskimos are kidnapped. By the time of American explorer Robert Perry, 1906, the Eskimos are bought to New York to be displayed as “living specimens” for the American Museum of Natural History.

Now I have to pause after reading these passages and witness, all these years later, the encounter between the Inuit people who lived on the planet for thousands of years and these new comers, arrogant and cruel.

How many times has this Event taken place? How many people endured the destruction of their homes and the death of their loved ones?

I see these people, helpless, wondering, what is happening to them? I can have this horrible vision because I’m from a people who have been on the receiving end of this nightmare. Somewhere in Africa, long ago, that encounter took place - a kidnapping happened and, as cargo, commodity, costing so much - an ancestor was auctioned and sold maybe in Boston or New York, but then taken down river.

In the very next paragraph, only 13 pages into the book, the author and her host, an Inuit female, discuss the bounty that is to be found in Kangerlussuaq Valley: reindeer. The older woman speaks: “We rowed umiaks from Illorsuit and Uummannaq. It was good hunting. The place was always full of flowers. We were happy there. So many reindeer. Some we ate, some meat we dried. There were many, and when we rowed back to the villages, the boats were full of meat and the blood ran under our kamiks [boots] like flood water.”

I stopped reading and put the book down without hesitation. For a while afterward, I could see young calves falling as they ran alongside their mothers. I could see mothers fall. Whole families of reindeer.

So much for This Cold Heaven.

And yet, I can’t, with the chorus, speak of “we” when it comes to the perpetuation of violence on this planet.

As of last year, and much more intensely in the last few months of this year, we humans have had to confront a massacre of human lives at the hands of a tiny, invisible virus. And, unlike the reindeer or the Inuit or Africans, we are being brought down, for the most part, without a family member along aside us. We are the meal now.

In the last weeks of April, Americans took to the streets, not in anticipation of May 1st. Americans didn’t risk their health to come out, practicing physical distancing and wearing face masks to commemorate International Workers Day. After all, by the end of April, some thirty million Americans had filed unemployment claims.

In the pandemic where over 60,000 Americans have died, it would be comforting to see in the news footage of Americans demanding PPE for medical personnel. How empowering to have witnessed Americans risking their lives on behalf of others, joining with fellow workers on the frontlines during this pandemic. How about Americans coming out of their homes, maintaining six feet distancing, masked and even gloved, organizing phone trees and exchanging emails in order to establish home schools via the Internet. Neighbors with same age children and with teaching or arts and crafts skills, waving fliers with dates and times for initiating a new normal for educating our children.

Americans followed another tradition.

It’s disheartening to witness irrational thinking galvanizing one too many Americans to come out into the streets with AR15s, military-style weaponry, to demand a return to work. Open America up for business! Or else!

This while the numbers are rising. That is, the number of Americans dying is rising, but a certain segment of the American citizenry is still at war with other American citizens. Resorting to an old tradition to problem solve. We want more land, we take it. No matter the rights of the inhabitants.

And isn’t that the problem? It’s okay for white Americans to arm themselves with military weaponry to protest their right to return to work, if there’s work to return to, while blacks, Latinx, and Indigenous populations, protesting their right to clean water, to housing, health care, meaningful employment, are seen as “socialists” or “anti-American,” and, depending on the state or city, the protesters are carted off to jail.

It’s not even conceivable to think a black or Latinx, male or female, stepping out of their homes carrying an AR15, would return home alive. This is America! COVID-19 would come in second to the “Breaking News” that black Americans protesting on American streets, were armed with AR15s! Pictures of such an event would bring down the Internet!

Gun ownership is as American as those pies baked in the new “garden of Eden” that was America. In the South, surrounding plantations, home-grown militia units formed to persuade enslaved blacks that the best place for them was on the plantation, and nowhere else. Further south, on the border, white men carried their arms to assure the whiteness of the southern states, even if a delusional undertaking.

And so the narrative goes, in “progressive” states, violence toward the vulnerable, toward children, animals, violence toward other races of humanity is a thing of the past.

Except when it’s not.

Who are these people?

I think of all the hours spent in academia and in discussions in these non-for profit organizations paying lip service to ending violence, all that pontificating, pretending to be offended by the resolve of humans to rely on violence that leaves in its wake destruction and death. How angry is the moderator or the lecturer, the distinguished guest speaker, who, for a fee, all, will echo each other about the “we” who do so much harm to the planet? Only in passing, is it even mentioned that people of color, globally, are suffering the brunt of Western history toward people of color and Western policies toward life on this planet.

Spain massacred over 50 million in Latin America. Portugal did its part to eliminate 4.5 million people.

Only in passing! Otherwise, it’s human beings this and human beings that… and rarely is a discussion about violence - that that is making inhabitable this Earth, our home, or inhabitable this neighborhood or city - being the consequences of the mindset of one race of people. The “we” humans destroying the planet is aligned with those humans arriving as arrogantly and confidently on the street with AR15s. The latter are just less deceptive. They see themselves as the true Americans. But, then, so do most white Americans.

Some carry guns, some carry portfolios and the accountant’s cell phone number. Either way, damage is done, physically or verbally.

No media pundit nor neo-liberal academic is willing to educate this population of their brethren about the use of the “family” gun and military-style bayonets to wipe out some 15 million Indigenous people here in the US. No Ivy League campus is expected to step up and use Zoom or some form of social media to remind the gun-carrying protesters that some 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the US to become the enslaved population just might have established a different interpretation of the word, freedom, when an enslaved tried to escape or when a collective of African Americans linked arms to protest the practice of lynching and Jim Crow legislation.

You would think this would happen in a country that so wants to move on. Always to move on! Profits are at the end of the tunnel!

To speak of all of humanity sharing equally in the destruction and killing is disingenuous: it’s not all human beings because the majority of the world’s population is living within the confines of a white, male, and Western narrative that recognizes only one ruling race and no other. It’s a mindset that turns a profit determining what’s torn down or built up, who lives and who dies. And it’s contagious but by no means equal in terms of the sheer amount of destruction and death. The face of violence against humanity, however, isn’t just CEOs on Wall Street.

“The architecture of the modern state was inscribed in modern law, Western law. The rule of law was in turn central to construction of civilized society, in short, civil society,” Mahmood Mandani has written in his analysis of the Rwandan genocide.

Long before there was a genocide in Rwanda, there was a German army in Africa and a vulnerable Herero people in 1904, Mandani writes. Germany’s army slaughtered over 80% of the Herero, a people for whom it’s likely had no idea that Germany thought itself superior, let alone entitled to slaughter them and destroy their land.

But the Germany army in locating them - living - determined that, as Europeans, they would do as Europeans had done for centuries: kidnap and slaughter with impunity, and enslave. Just as “discoverers” in the New World accomplished, writes Mandani, when they came upon the Indigenous people here in the Americas. The “discoverers” couldn’t just let the people be. These people were different like the Herero would appear to the Germans.

Germany will rise to the occasion again once it crafts a narrative describing an enemy so hideous as to be non-human and therefore a grave threat to the welfare of not only the German people, but to the entire world. An assimilated people, a European people, but, well, not so.

The Jews in Europe and the blacks in Africa and the Indigenous in the Americas have in common the history of being nearly exterminated, tortured, kidnapped, displaced, and temporarily, written out of the history of humanity.

By the time the callousness of white Western thought about race played out in Rwanda in 1994, close to 1,000,000 people were dead. Some 70% of the Tutsi population was eliminated. And the toll on girls and women sexually assaulted and maimed is imaginable, unfortunately. The world’s majority of humanity, people of color, has witnessed this level of violence. The practice of conquer and divide worked in Rwanda. The Tutsi, studied in Western research labs, and “found” to be “superior” to the Hutu, believed in their invincibility. They believed themselves to be, as Mandani explains, “settlers” rather than “neighbors.”

In the US, in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, more African Americans and Latinx are dying from the virus than any other group of people. And the gun carriers want the economy flowing again over the dead and dying bodies of people of color.

People of color around the world have never been “in this together.” People of color have always been “discovered” by Euro-Americans to be viable slaughter and the survivors, usable as cheap or free labor. But never equal, not even human.

Stay calm!

There’s a population of Americans who want to return to normal - only normal will endanger those like me with compromised immune systems. And the government, led by our Dear Leader, agrees. Opening the country up for business is the best way to beat the virus! The usual, that is, systemically repressed and therefore vulnerable population, is expendable!

And I’m expendable in my home. Already a captive in that I share a living room wall with a younger, fifties-something white woman who knows it’s possible to torment a black woman with impunity. After all, what’s to be done when so many white Americans find themselves without employment or any possibly of returning to employment or full employment?

Imagine white America’s surprise when informed that black Americans make up a large number of the service sector of the US workforce. The familiar narrative spoke of “lazy” African Americans who don’t work! How jarring is this fact with the imagined belief in white superiority!

As for my neighbor, I finally spoke with the older woman below her. I took a chance - a black woman complaining of head and earaches and chest pains as a result of the behavior of a white woman. But I was informed that this neighbor set her surround sound system to high frequency at night. It’s difficult for my cat and I to sleep, and while my cat shakes his head frequently as he rubs his ears, I awake to unbearable pain, and debating whether or not to call for an ambulance.

As a “settler,” she recognizes her right to execute violence against those historically “discovered” to be inferior, nonhuman. In this era of Trump, she’s given a license to be cruel. The Dear Leader won’t mind; in fact, he will defend her right to be, contrary to blacks in the Obama era who were reprimanded for not taking “responsibility” for our behavior!

In this era of Trump, online sites offer tutorials on how to annoy your neighbor! How to get rid of your neighbor!

This is America, steadily progressing toward a more humane society, huh?

I’ve removed beef and pork from my diet, but unfortunately I consume chicken. I use curry and turmeric, and I’m working on a diet as close to Mediterranean as possible. But I’ve been a cat parent since 1981. For a stretch, I traveled with two “boys.” the three of us even staying a year in Ethiopia where I had the opportunity to teach college undergraduate and graduate students black literature.

The pet industry revenue in America was 62.59 billion in 2018, according to the American Pet Products Association. No doubt, the industry continues to do good business, as they say. I can’t imagine why online business for establishments such as Chewy.com or Petco would be hurting profit-wise since most Americans are following the stay-at-home orders.

But Americans spend money on grooming and pet manicures too. It’s not just the food products. In the meantime, few of these loving pet parents think about the pigs and goats and chickens - antibiotic-free animals now and carefully crammed together to produce a “happier” experience on the way to slaughter so as to relieve the anxiety of our liberal-minded population.

Philosopher Yuval Noah Harari writes that escaping this “imagined order” wasn’t possible. “There’s no way out.” We can try but “when we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a larger prison.” Pretty grim - but we who have been oppressed for so long can’t afford to adopt a mindset that binds humanity to an inescapable fate.

I would like to read a travel book in which the author, joining, say, an Inuit community, came upon members already committed to ending the killing of animals, even if a long-standing tradition. Maybe the end of humans killing humans would follow.