November 19, 2003
Some Are Indeed More Equal Than Others
Brent Staples, the black columnist (he reports he has
Cherokee blood) published a piece in the November 18
New York Times about the
Black Seminoles. This is the group in the southwest
whose ancestry comes from both the Seminole Indians in
Florida and from escaped slaves and freedmen.
Black Seminoles fought
against American civilization in the
Florida swamps, and for it on the Western Plains,
where they were
scouts for the U.S. Cavalry. (Staples mentions only
the Florida part, of which he seems to approve.)
Some modern Seminoles don’t consider them
real Indians, and the black Seminoles receive only
some of the benefits that Indians get from the
Bureau of Indian Affairs.
It turns out that Indians are more racist than white
people (this is not quite how Staples puts it), for when
a Black Seminole woman
“…challenged rules that
barred blacks from receiving benefits, some other
members told her to ‘go back to Africa’ and referred to
the black Seminoles as ‘cattle’ while mooing and
stamping their feet in the meeting hall. Ms. Davis was
threatened with death after she persuaded a young civil
rights lawyer, Jon Velie, to file the first of several
suits against the tribe and the government.
Reactionaries seized control of the tribe and expelled
the Freedmen, along with Ms. Davis.”
The odd thing about this article is its title: “The
Black Seminole Indians Keep Fighting for Equality in the
American West.”
What the someone who seeks to be classified as an
Indian is seeking is not “equality” but racial
special privilege.
Staples says that activist Sylvia Davis’s goal is to “secure for black Seminoles the federally
financed benefits
enjoyed by nonblack Seminoles.”
“But the decision to
grant black Seminoles second-class benefits —
while excluding them from the
health,
prescription and
housing benefits that are given to other
Seminoles — has strengthened Ms. Davis's resolve to
fight on.”
[All emphases are mine, if you haven’t guessed.]
All those federally funded goodies are not what most
people mean by “equality,” what Abraham Lincoln
called, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, “common
right of humanity.”
Instead they represent the “divine right of
kings.”
If you are born an American Indian, you have the
right to a variety of special privileges and immunities
which neither whites not blacks can claim.
The immunities include immunity to
gambling laws and tobacco taxes, and even sovereign
immunity from the Civil Rights laws! (The only part of
the package of which Mr. Staples
disapproves, since it reminds him too much of
States Rights.)
The privileges that come with Indian birth include a
large share of the (mostly white)
American taxpayer’s dollar. A piece of this
interracial wealth transfer is what the Black Seminoles
are fighting for.
To quote Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates
again:
“It is the same principle
in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same
spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and
I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether
from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the
people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their
labor, or from one race of men as an apology for
enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical
principle.”
I suppose the Black Seminoles have as much right to
this kind of graft as the paler kind of Seminole.
But don’t call it “equality.”
