The Domination Blues

Its Time to Ask Ourselves a Different Kind of Question

“The United States wished to control and the means of control are logic, law, and terror.”—Jay Cantor, The Space Within: Literature and Politics (1981, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Image: Slavery-Wikipedia

THE DOMINATION BLUES

I don’t know enough about the musical genre of “the Blues” to write intelligently about them. But if “the Blues” are “a state of agitation and depression,” then acute and chronic oppression is bound to cause “the Blues” in those who have been dominated, day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, and century after century. The magic of “the Blues” emerged as an ingenious musical response by Africans to the controlled terrorized space of slavery.

When the voyagers from western christendom invasively arrived to this Turtle Island continent, they declared our Native ancestors to be “barbarous,” meaning “only partially human,” or not yet fully human. Why? Because they were not yet living under and subject to domination by christian europeans. They were still­ living free and independent of the domination system of western christendom.

How could our Native ancestors “become” human from the perspective of the people who identified themselves as “christian” and “european”? They could become defined as “human” by being forced to live under the domination of christian europeans. This involved a methodical process.

We now see that the christian europeans refused to consider our ancestors to be “human” until they had been 1) baptized, 2) given a christian name, 3) subjected to torment, misery, and suffering by being made, in California for example, to construct the mission buildings, and 4) deprived of their lands upon which they had been able to, until then, maintain a free and independent lifestyle.

Later, so long as our ancestors were still living free and independent of the American system of domination, the self-identified christian europeans would not consider them “human” and “civilized.” It was not until our Native ancestors had been conditioned to live under and subject to the U.S. system of domination that the invading American colonizers would define our ancestors as being “human” to the extent they were under domination.

This being the case, in what ways does this change our understanding of the category “human”? Based on what we have stated above, let’s look at the properties of the category human. In the above stated context, they are:

1) Not allowed to live free and independent of some version of the system of domination;

2) Metaphorically named in terms of and in a way that identifies each person with the system of domination;

3) Presumed to be subject to the authority of the domination system;

4) Presumed to be obligated to pay financially to help maintain the system of domination.

To illustrate the point, let us now quote Judge John Catron from the Tennessee Supreme Court in a decision he issued in the case State v. Foreman (1835), shortly before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Andrew Jackson.

Photo: Tennessee State Library and Archives, tnsos.org.

Catron said that a “principle” had been “declared in the fifteenth century as the law of Christendom.” The principle was, “that discovery gave title to assume sovereignty [domination] over and to govern [dominate] the unconverted natives of Africa, Asia and North and South America.”

He said the principle has been “recognized as a part of the national law [law of nations], for nearly four centuries, and that it is now so recognized by every Christian power, in its political department and its judicial [its courts].” He said that “from Cape Horn to Hudson Bay, it [the principle] had been acted upon as the only known rule of sovereign power [domination], by which the native Indian is coerced; for conquest [domination] is unknown to him in the international sense.” He continued:

“Our claim is based on the right to coerce obedience. The claim [of a right of domination] may be denounced by the moralist. We answer, it is the law of the land. Without its assertion and vigorous execution, this continent never could have been inhabited [dominated] by our ancestors. To abandon the principle [of domination] now, is to assert that they were unjust usurpers [dominators]; and that we, succeeding to their usurped [unjust dominating] authority and void claims to possess and govern [dominate] the country, should in honesty abandon it, return to Europe, and let the subdued [dominated] parts again become a wilderness [a place existing free from christian european domination] and hunting ground [an economy for free Native nations and peoples].”

Our opening quote of Jay Cantor about “logic, law, and terror” is referencing the system of domination. Politics is the Art of Domination, making it akin to the Art of Persuasion, which Aristotle defined as “the faculty for finding all the available means of persuasion in a given situation.” As my rhetoric professor Dominic Larusso once noted “all the available means” of persuasion ranges from candy to coercion and even torture.

Once we realize that we are living in a perpetual state of domination, the ability to ask a different kind of question arises: Is this the time when we can begin at long last to collectively call for “humans” living under domination to call for an end to a global system founded on the claim of a right of domination over others and over all Life?