I’ve probably told this story once or twice, but I’ll tell it again for good measure. Back in 1980 I was a student at S.U.N.Y. New Paltz and during the course of that year I had the opportunity to hear Stokely Carmichael speak on campus. He shared the stage with a Palestinian activist – sadly, I do not recall who that person was. In any case, a goodly portion of their talk centered on Israel/Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle.

There were several middle-aged people in the audience that day who challenged the speakers on Israel/Palestine. I can’t say that I recall the exact wording of some of the challenges, but one question they put forward – not an uncommon one at that time – was that with over a dozen Arab countries in the region, why isn’t there room for one Jewish state? This and their other questions were not going over well in the room, which was packed with students. At one point one of the middle aged men referenced the holocaust, and Stokely’s response went something like this:

“When you said ‘holocaust’, I thought you meant MY holocaust. But now I know you were talking about the Indians.”

First impressions

I was a leftist back then, pretty much as radical as I am today, though less knowledgeable (if you can believe it). When I heard Stokely say this, I felt I knew where he was going with it, but I thought it was kind of hyperbolic and incendiary. At some point, though, in the decades that followed, I came to understand what he meant. His people did experience a holocaust, as did first peoples in America. But instead of ending, the black holocaust has shape-shifted, adapted, and transitioned into the current reality – one where Black Americans have less than one quarter the wealth of white Americans on average, where Black mortality and morbidity rates are higher than whites, and so on.

What’s more, white people have never atoned or particularly regretted the holocaust perpetrated on African-Americans. There has been no de-Nazification, no reparations. New ways to extend the legacy of chattel slavery keep being innovated, like the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, subjecting those who can become pregnant to forced gestation, one of the central pillars of American slavery.

The holocaust against first peoples is too similar to the Nazi mother of all crimes to be denied. For the longest time, it was minimized, justified as part of a civilizing mission, etc. But in the end, millions were here … and then they weren’t.

Increasingly hard lesson to learn

Of course, now we’re seeing Republican-driven legislation to bar any discussion in school of either holocaust (and to some extent, even the Nazi holocaust) for fear of making white kids uncomfortable. It seems like the overriding objective of this policy is to return education to where it was when I attended grade school. The teachers in my grammar school didn’t talk about anything that would make white people uncomfortable – that was their entire audience, I should add. New Hartford School District (New York state) is more diverse today, but back in the sixties it was white as a sheet.

Most of my learning about race took place outside of the confines of school, in any case. And at 63, I’m still learning. I think one of the most effectively educational pieces of media I have seen on this topic is The Underground Railroad – not because it is a factual account, but because it so effectively uses the tools of video storytelling to reproduce for white audiences some element of the terror that black Americans have been subjected to. It hits you like a boat paddle upside the head, frankly, and that’s what we need to shake us out of our stupor and acknowledge that this was a holocaust, pure and simple.

Stokely was right, man. It took me decades to get there, but better late than never, right?