Raoul Peck's Journey Into The Heart of Whiteness

[AFP/Daniel Leal-Olivas]

By Tony Karon

Derek Chauvin was an exception.

Not by virtue of being a police officer who murdered an unarmed Black person – that happens all the time. In the period of his trial alone, cops killed an average of three people a day around the U.S., the majority of the victims Black or brown. But Chauvin is the rare instance of an officer tried and convicted for that act of killing. And his body language on hearing the verdict suggested he was genuinely shocked at being found guilty.

Chauvin’s body language during the murder of George Floyd was also telling. The calm indifference on his face, hand in pocket, as his knee choked the life out of Floyd’s prostrate body might be deemed the mark of a psychopath outside the context of everything we know about power and race in America. In a more humane context, bystanders would not hesitate to physically intervene to stop Floyd’s murder. But Chauvin wore a uniform that licensed him to kill on behalf of the state, making any effort to stop him potentially suicidal. And – as even President Biden implies when he terms the murder an instance of “systemic racism” – George Floyd’s skin painted him as less than human in the eyes of his killer.

An uncountable number of murders like George Floyd’s have been performed over decades and centuries by men like Chauvin, charged with maintaining the American social order. And like all the “new worlds” that Europeans colonized, the United States was built on a white supremacist ideology that enabled its enforcers to maintain a good conscience while enacting the unconscionable violence required by the system. It’s on the systemic legacy of that ideology that Raoul Peck’s extraordinary four-part HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes is focused.

Peck demands that we grasp the significance of the toxic fantasy that is “whiteness” – an idea that refers not to any group of people, but to a power relationship. Whiteness is a supremacist ideology of power, privilege and the subordination of those it deems “other” – an imagined system of difference whose purpose was to sanctify the monstrous violence involved in subordinating tens of millions of Africans and Indigenous Americans to European greed.

Killing is deemed a criminal act in most legal and moral systems, but in a genocide, it is indemnified – blessed even – by the system that unleashes it. The perpetrators, always, have been led to believe they are killing for the greater good. Much of the wealth that fueled American capitalism was generated by an originally settler elite claiming the land of the Indigenous people and the bodies of enslaved Africans as their own “private property” – a claim enacted and enforced by sustained atrocities against BIPOC Americans.

But how were the God-fearing Christian perpetrators able to feel human even as they enacted an inhuman reign of terror over the enslaved and Indigenous? The short answer is whiteness – a supremacist ideology that sanctified violence against those deemed not “white” by denying their humanity.

This legitimizing of brutality by those deemed “white” against those deemed “other” was common wherever Europeans killed, tortured, raped and thieved their way across Africa and Latin America, an ideology Peck shows originating in the Catholic Church.

Thus the supremacist “commonsense” in which generations of white soldiers, slave-drivers, police officers and vigilantes have been so easily able to extinguish Black lives without disrupting their own sense of morality.

The Guyanese scholar Anthony Bogues writes that because humans make sense of ourselves via the way we remember history – “taking from the past to make the self” – the systematic, dehumanizing violence against Black and brown bodies in America’s past “becomes a critical way to establish the grounds for inhumane ways of life.”

And, he says, “The US’s unwillingness to confront the fact that it was a slave society since its founding as a British colony, and that practices of settler colonialism wreaked havoc on indigenous populations … now provides a dominant common sense which structures the present.”

That spirit infuses Peck’s docuseries, which insists that the systemic racism cited by Biden cannot be transcended without understanding and confronting this ugly history and its painful legacy. Biden’s comments – and the frenzied denial of that reality by his Republican opponents, even as they double down on efforts to prevent Black people from voting – remind us that today’s political polarization is a sign that the U.S. is no longer able to sustain a consensus based on ignoring the enduring, painful consequences of the country’s ugly origin story.

Bogues sees the divide roiling U.S. politics as a crisis created by an historical reckoning – that the myths of American exceptionalism and its assumption of virtue on the part of those in power over the centuries are no longer sustainable in the face of the legacy of the society’s foundations in violent, racialized slavery and dispossession. Instead, our society is caught at a crossroads between confronting the ugly side of its past, or doubling down on white supremacy: “When the mob trashed the Capitol Building and its offices they were making it clear that for them American liberal democracy did not have the capacity to renew the country, that what was required was the ditching of liberalism and a return to an imagined community based upon the historic ideas of white settler colonialism and patriarchy.”

Peck seeks to help his audience make sense of white supremacy via the Nazi Holocaust – after all, it’s a widely shared consensus that the systematic murder of millions of European Jews was an epic evil that required deep and sustained atonement by all culpable national communities, and the education of successive generations to guard against any sort of repeat.

He also focuses on the connection between the horrors committed on European soil during the Holocaust and the genocidal terror that “white” Europe and the U.S. had unleashed over hundreds of years on Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. In the tradition of intellectuals from Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt to more contemporary writers such as W.G. Sebald, Sven Lindqvist and Pankaj Mishra, Peck’s films connect these horrors as outgrowths of white supremacy. It was the “racializing” of Jews, i.e. dehumanizing them (along with Roma and Slavs) in the Nazis’ white supremacist gaze that created in the minds of the perpetrators a moral universe that permitted the genocide – the same white supremacist moral universe that had allowed Europeans over hundreds of years to legitimize centuries of drenching Africa and the Americas in blood and tears.

One of Peck’s most striking scripted interludes has a Black priest encounter a Black slaver brutally driving a column of white children in chains through an African jungle. The power of these visual juxtapositions is that they attack the viewer’s unconscious bias, i.e. the learned dehumanization of the “other” that has sustained white supremacy for centuries – and which is clearly at work in the pattern of police brutalization of people of color. Yes, 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot dead in Chicago in March with his hands raised, was a child. Yes, 12-year-old Tamir Rice killed by a cop in Cleveland in 2014 was a child. But did their killers actually see them as children in the way that they see the children in their own homes or extended families?

Could it be that the ongoing state violence we’re seeing against BIPOC Americans is rooted in our society’s failure to confront the depth of barbarism that the United States visited upon generation after generation of enslaved Africans, and on the Indigenous populations they forced from the land? Peck believes we know the answer.

Exterminate All the Brutes offers its audience a powerful tool for comprehending systemic racism – of what it is that America would have to dismantle to get past it.

We should have nothing to fear from taking such a journey: We cannot change the past, but we can change the future. “You already know enough,” says Peck, quoting from his friend Sven Lindqvist’s book that guided his series. “So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”

---

You might also enjoy