When Americans first learned that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
had been collectively vaporized in less time than it takes for the heart
to beat, many cheered. But not all. Black poet Langston Hughes at once
recognized the moral depravity of executing 100,000 people and discerned
racism as the phenomenon that had licensed the depravity: “How come we
did not try them [atomic bombs] on Germany...They just did not want to
use them on white folks.”^4
<http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture#_edn4>
Although the building of the weapon was completed only after Germany
surrendered on May 7, 1945, Japan had been designated the target on
September 18, 1944, and training for the mission had already been
initiated in that same month.^5
<http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture#_edn5>
Black journalist George Schuyler wrote: “The atom bomb puts the
Anglo-Saxons definitely on top where they will remain for decades”; the
country, in its “racial arrogance,” has “achieved the supreme triumph of
being able to slaughter whole cities at a time.”^6
<http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture#_edn6>
Still within the first year (and still before John Hersey had begun to
awaken Americans to the horrible aversiveness of the injuries), novelist
and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston denounced the U.S. president as a
“butcher” and scorned the public’s silent compliance, asking, “Is it
that we are so devoted to a ‘good Massa’ that we feel we ought not to
even protest such crimes?”^7
<http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture#_edn7>
Silence—whether practiced by whites or people of color—was, she saw, a
cowardly act of moral enslavement to a white supremacist.
Each of these three passages, and scores of others, are documented in
Vincent Intondi’s brilliant history, African-Americans Against the Bomb
(2015), which chronicles the repudiation by the Black community of
nuclear arms from the 1940s up through President Obama’s April 5, 2009,
Prague speech: jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, composer and pianist
Duke Ellington, civil rights and gay activist Bayard Rustin,
poet-novelist James Baldwin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, civil rights
leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and sociologist and pan-Africanist
W. E. B. Du Bois are among those who spoke out decisively and often.
During these same decades, many white people also spoke out against the
moral depravity of nuclear weapons, some even suffering terrible costs
similar to those suffered by, for example, Du Bois, who because of his
ardent denunciation of the American nuclear arsenal was at various
points arrested, accused of being an unregistered foreign agent, denied
a passport, and eventually prompted to expatriate to Ghana.^8
<http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture#_edn8>
But Black Americans, in addition to educating all who would hear about
the moral depravity of the inflicted injuries, have also sought
tirelessly to educate the country about the racial scaffolding that
provides the gantry on which the missiles are launched.
full:
http://bostonreview.net/war-security-global-justice/elaine-scarry-racist-foundation-nuclear-architecture
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