“WAR ZONE” IS THE cliché people tend to reach for when describing poor urban neighborhoods. Various representations of the Bronx in 1980s, like the films The Warriors and Fort Apache: The Bronx played up this metaphor. In popular culture at the time, my home borough might as well have been Beirut. People constantly used the phrase “bombed out.”
This is a common way of understanding urban environments. Not long before Timothy Loehmann shot and killed Tamir Rice, the Department of Justice issued a scathing report on the Cleveland police department’s patterns and practices of discrimination and the use of force. One detail sums up the entire problem with the mindset of policing in the Colony. The DOJ had “observed a large sign hanging in the vehicle bay of a district station identifying it as a ‘forward operating base,’ a military term for ‘a small, secured outpost used to support tactical operations in a war zone.’ ”
Forward operating base. That phrase captures the psychology of many police officers: they see themselves as combatants in a war zone, besieged and surrounded, operating in enemy territory, one wrong move away from sudden death. And here’s the thing. It’s not an act. I’m sure Timothy Loehmann was indeed terrified. That fear, the fear of the occupying solider, is the entire problem.
The mindset of the occupier in restive and dangerous territory is not unique to the Cleveland police department, of course. Nor is the mindset that led to the death of Tamir Rice new. More than fifty years ago, before the war on drugs, before SWAT teams and mandatory minimums and private prisons and “stop and frisk,” before the entire modern-day Colony was constructed, James Baldwin wrote that a white police officer “moves through Harlem . . . like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.”
If the white Harlem cop in Baldwin’s day walked the streets stalked by fear of the natives, aware he was fundamentally foreign to the land he patrolled, then he was partaking in an American tradition that stretches back, in a literal way, to the country’s origins.
To be outnumbered and afraid in a land not your own, and to attempt to bring it under your control—this is the great recurring theme of the American project, and it is shot through at every moment by fear and violence and subjugation. That fear stalks our history’s winners even as they conquer and conquer and settle and conquer some more.
The first European settlers who arrived in Jamestown were attacked almost immediately. The early colonial governor of Virginia George Percy, who helped sail the Virginia Company of London’s first fleet, recalled the first day of landfall in 1606.
At night, when we were going aboard, there came the Savages creeping upon all fours, from the Hills, like Bears, with their Bows in their mouths, [who] charged us very desperately in the faces, hurt Captain Gabriel Archer in both his hands, and a sailor in two places of the body very dangerous. After they had spent their Arrows, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise, and so left us.
The experience of Jamestown was dire and miserable, a tale of violence, sickness, death, and ultimately abandonment. Six hundred miles north in Plymouth, things wouldn’t be quite as bad, but despite our Thanksgiving myth of peaceable coexistence, fear cloaked life in its every instant. The relationship between settlers and Indians mostly consisted of mutual terror punctuated by atrocities. Squanto, the lovable English-speaking Indian of the Thanksgiving story, was actually a man who’d been kidnapped from his village, then transported across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery in Europe. He would escape and make it back to America only to find out his entire village had been wiped out by European disease.
The Thanksgiving tradition we celebrate today with a feast actually commemorates a betrayal that happened two years after the first arrival of the colonists. In 1622, Myles Standish, an English military officer working for the Pilgrims, heard that Indians planned to raid the newly established white settlement of Wessagussett. Standish organized a militia to repel the attack, but no Indians appeared. So he decided to preemptively attack by luring two Indians to Wessagussett under the pretense of sharing a meal. When they entered the house, Standish and his men killed them.
Bernard Bailyn, the great scholar of the American colonial project’s first century, calls this period the “barbarous years.” “The savagery,” he once wrote, was driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness . . . in which God’s children,” as the colonists thought of themselves, “were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them.”
Within a century or two, settlers and the U.S. government had succeeded in ethnically cleansing, conquering, and corralling the continent’s indigenous people. But there would always be a new enemy at the gate. In the South, of course, it was the constant demographic weight of the slaves under the whip, who so outnumbered their masters that the possibility of revolt dominated the nightmares of the slaver class. The master went to bed in his house every night, protected from dozens of men and women he owned by his accumulated weaponry and his ability to terrorize them.