It’s the Apocalypse, Stupid

The opening track on Prince Paul’s 1997 hip hop masterpiece, Psychoanalysis: What Is It, repeats this refrain: “As long as I can remember / people have hated me,” and it’s this line which I am thinking of now. Perhaps because the history of prejudice winds so far into the distant recesses of civilization, with some truly astonishing actors conveying some jawdroppingly embarrassing misconceptions—and it through the lens of this hatred that the current potential ending of the American experiment is best understood.

Aristotle described certain persons as “slaves by nature” and the Spanish Inquisition codified limpieza de sangre or “purity of blood” statutes, marking one of the earliest bureaucratic racial ideologies, although India’s caste system is perhaps the most ancient. What makes and has always made American racism so striking is it so flagrantly contradicts its own mythology—because the uses of prejudice will always trump the illogic of it. At the time of America’s founding it was deemed a necessary evil by the North (or so the rationale goes) to keep the South on side, and in the South, it was deemed a necessary evil (or inherent good depending on who you talked to) necessary to uphold their agrarian economy and it has continued to serve its uses—in service of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Ku Klux Klan and—in a different form and directed at a different people—in Hitler’s Germany—or apartheid South Africa—or the Belgian colonial policy that led to hardening the Hutu and Tutsi social categories, a policy that ultimately led to the Rwandan genocide. Prejudice has always been a tool and although its specific purpose may vary, it has a small set of very consistent methodologies, functions, and goals. How is it being used today?

A Passage to India is a remarkable document of a late stage colonial India and the mindset of its British ruling class. One of the book’s key villains is Ronny, a British functionary with a blatant and unconcealed distaste for his Indian subordinates, petitioners, and acquaintances, his tone reminded me very much of the constant indignation on display in people like Stephen Miller and others in high level positions in the current administration, but the space those voices occupy is very different. Ronny is an example of a low level bureaucrat in a colonial power at the tail end of its power—he exists in a world functioning within the paradigm of progress and we are meant to read him as one small villain in a world that increasingly knows better. Stephen Miller on the other hand is consciously working to reinvent that same colonial atmosphere both at home and abroad in a world where the narrative of progress has been replaced by doom scrolling and ideologies of fear, and for good reason. The weather alone is enough to give you nightmares, not to mention AI and the very real possibility of WWIII. The mindset of the colonialist is returning because the world has gone zipping off the cliff and everybody’s at a loss about what to do, so they revert to the most ancient ideology there is—the ideology of the blood, of the tribe.