The Color of the Enemy in the New Millennium

The unresolved meaning of blackness calls the practice of whiteness in North America into the open.

The West of our time is facing a crisis of enemy-atrophy. Since the demise of the East-West conflict in the last decade, global capitalism has scrambled to serve up new "enemy-images" serious enough to stimulate arms production; at the same time, technological advances push war-making into the realm of the surreal. On the one hand, the Gulf War provided the "exciting" (albeit fictitious) possibility of prosecuting a war without losses -- and Kosovo has confirmed the scenario. On the other, however, like markets themselves, "enemies" now are quintessentially local and subject to rapid reconfiguration. As events in Littleton, Colorado and Conyers, Georgia have served notice, who qualifies as a "worthy target" in the post-cold war era is not so readily controlled. It should not be surprising that when violence against an "other" is vigorously conscripted to secure one's own identity and the technologies of that violence are rigorously marketed as commodities, "enemies" are more likely to appear--and be used "as " enemies -- in familiar places. As Pogo not long ago prophesied: "The enemy is us." The problem, however, is that the "us" of such a late capitalist pop culture proverb does not really mean all of us. Understanding the new boundaries of belonging in our new postindustrial world order is part of the purpose of this essay. What follows here is an augury that I hope proves false.

The recent teen-on-teen violence of Littleton and Conyers could serve as a significant portent of the new millennium if America had the theological capacity to read in depth and not just in alarm. Fellow classmates newly defined as "enemies" are not to be dismissed as a mere whim of teenage fantasy (like in "Dungeons and Dragons"), nor are they the result of testosterone on a rampage. What is frightening about Littleton, in particular, is its linkage with a growing phenomenon in North America that will likely be combated only with broad-based action and a kind of political will not characteristic of our history. That phenomenon is a resurgent form of white nationalism galvanized by a growing sense of white dispossession (as the country diversifies). The portent is the possibility of a racial conflict that might not look all that different from recent events in former Yugoslavia.

For instance, recent years have witnessed ritualized forms of racialized violence in North America -- enacted on official and unofficial "enemies" alike -- that are arguably not so much anomalous as symptomatic. The dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, the wasting of an unarmed Amadou Diallo by nineteen of forty-one bullets fired on him by the New York police, and the savage sodomizing of Abner Louima in the same city by five officers are emblematic of something ferocious and unresolved in the dominant culture. But these rather obvious "signs of the times" are only one species of signal. Their appearance becomes more foreboding when considered alongside less apparently racialized happenings like the conviction of Timothy MacVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing, numerous arrests for plots to bomb various other public sites, and the enigmatic bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta -- all involving some measure of right-wing paranoia about a broad international conspiracy to initiate a new world order unde r the secret control of the "surrogates" of Satan. At the same time, conspiracy theories (involving some combination of national government, international elites, and supraterrestrial aliens) have gained an ever-more fascinated following in North American popular culture, as evidenced in "cult-shows" like "X Files," "Dark Skies," and "Millennium." On the other side of a divide that remains profoundly racialized (despite multicultural claims to the contrary), gangsta rap continues to defy a society it portrays as viciously brutal in its neo-colonial policing and judicial "management" of urban desperation. A group like "Public Enemy" captures much of the irony of the situation in its name alone: whose is "the enemy," in which public space, constructed by what media, under whose control?

We enter the new millennium with a deeply unresolved dilemma that could make us easy prey to disaster if we are not critically attentive and diligently active in questioning the "images of enemies" our culture offers us.

Carl Rowan's 1996 book, The Coming Race War, provides the motive and to some degree sets the agenda for what needs to be pondered. Rowan argues that social-political developments over the last twenty years or so have set the stage for what could become an intractable race war. As Rowan points out, the June 1996 arrest of ten men and two women in Phoenix, Arizona on charges that they were plotting to blow up the building housing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Internal Revenue Service, the Secret Service and other federal agencies is but the tip of an iceberg that is far larger than most Americans are aware of or want to believe (Rowan, 8). The militia movement -- for which that Viper Militia group in Arizona is merely an emblem -- has already become the targeted base of operations for white supremacist ideologues like William Pierce, author of the virtual bible of far right paranoia, The Turner Diaries. It is part of a formula for disaster that includes: large-scale white denial; a deeply hi dden white racism that remains harrowing precisely in its hiddenness; the loss of real wages among U.S. workers as wealth concentrates at the top levels of society; and the division of our social space into enclosed and tightly secured communities of affluence and communities of poverty and color policed like colonial states. The mobilization of racial categories to "explain" economic and/or political losses, the exacerbation of racial conflict to focus blame, and the reorganization of institutional practice to reassert white privilege are ominous signs of the times.