Why write about microbes, hate and history at this moment? After all, microbes and history have been around longer than humans, and hate as long as humans found it useful.
My answer is that the notion of white supremacy was brought to our shores with the arrival of white people long before the United States of America existed. And the new arrivals also carried microbes deadly to the native people already here.
Historian William Cronon tells this story in his 1983 book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. The ancestors of the native people had crossed into what is now North America on a land bridge at the Bering Strait exposed during the last glacial epoch more than 20,000 years ago. Semi-arctic conditions and low population densities made it difficult for the microbes that triggered Old World diseases to survive and gain a foothold. Consequently, the native people of what we now call New England had no resistance to the diseases to which the Puritans had immunity.
Tuberculosis, measles, typhus and syphilis became endemic and “influenza in combination with pneumonia occurred regularly in epidemic proportions.” The first recorded epidemic was from 1616 to 1619. Mortality from the first wave of infections “was rarely less than 80 to 90 percent, and it was not unheard of for an entire village to be wiped out.” Subsequent waves of epidemics ravaged non-immune generations of native people and led to depopulation and massive disorganization. The result, Cronon reports, was a drop in the Native American population from 70,000 to 12,000 by 1675. “New Hampshire and Vermont were virtually depopulated as the western Abenaki declined from perhaps 10,000 to fewer than 500.”
Puritans found the cleared land and empty villages not only convenient but a godsend. The epidemics were seen as God’s providence to “make room” for the Puritans. John Winthrop, Puritan, lawyer and governor, wrote “God hath cleared our title to this place.” There is no doubt that the silent microbes carried by the new arrivals facilitated their initial foothold in New England and opened doors to westward expansion.
Some 20 years ago, the Census Bureau first projected that racial minorities would replace white people as the majority in the United States in the 2040s. This impending demographic change triggered fear of the loss of dominance among American racists and the belief that a conspiracy of “white genocide” is underway to replace white people with foreign, nonwhite populations. This conspiracy theory seems to me the flip side of John Winthrop’s notion of celestial assistance in “making room” (his words) for his Puritans.
Last month I received the 2019 Hate Map. Produced annually since 1990 by the Southern Poverty Law Center (of which I am a supporter), this map tallies active hate groups in the United States. The map accompanies the SPLC annual report, which categorizes the number of groups present in each state — no state has none — as well as the varieties of hate that unify their members.
The SPLC defines a hate group as “an organization that … has beliefs or practices that attach or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” Of the 940 active hate groups listed in 2019, white nationalist hate groups total 155, an increase of 55% since 2017. According to the SPLC report, a growing number of white supremacists call themselves “accelerationists” who “believe mass violence is necessary to bring about the collapse of our pluralistic society.” So called “manifestos” posted on social media by mass murderers often speak of “white replacement.”
Returning to microbes, the daily news now tracks infections and deaths caused by the current novel coronavirus pandemic. Nonwhite people are found in both categories in numbers well above their proportion of the general U.S. population. This seems to be because the jobs that our society allows many of them — to care for and serve others — carry a high risk of infection and are deemed “essential.” For instance, President Donald Trump’s use of the Defense Production Act obliges meat processing plants to operate despite the high rate of infection among the largely nonwhite work force. No work-from-home or continued paycheck is available for these workers.
Finally, as regards microbes and Native Americans, I have read that per capita infections in the Navajo Nation make it a “hot spot” alongside New York and elsewhere.
Microbes, like hate, can lurk unseen for long periods and then be released by the right conditions to devastate defenseless populations. History, and today’s news, remind us of this.
Joseph S. Warner lives in Unity.