The Crime Without a Name
Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this incisive blend of personal narrative and philosophical inquiry, journalist and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner seeks a new way to talk about racism in America.
Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name follows Pitner’s journey to identify and remedy the linguistic void in how we discuss race and culture in the United States. Ethnocide, first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term "genocide"), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. For Black Americans, who have endured this atrocity for generations, this erasure dates back to the transatlantic slave trade and reached new resonance in a post-Trump world.
Just as the concept of genocide radically reshaped our perception of human rights in the twentieth century, reframing discussions about race and culture in terms of ethnocide can change the way we understand our diverse and rapidly evolving racial and political climate in a time of increased visibility around police brutality and systemic racism. The Crime Without a Name traces the historical origins of ethnocide in the United States, examines the personal, lived consequences of existing within an ongoing erasure, and offers ways for readers to combat and overcome our country’s ethnocidal foundation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and philosopher Pitner debuts with an erudite if uneven look at how systemic racism imperils Black and Indigenous cultures in the U.S. Drawing on Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin's coinage of the terms genocide and ethnocide in the 1940s to describe Nazi atrocities against Jewish people, Pitner repurposes the latter term to denote "the destruction of a people's culture while keeping the people." The goal of ethnocide, he argues, is "perpetual oppression, exploitation, and inequality," and he traces its history in America from the transatlantic slave trade to the Jim Crow South and Donald Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric and policies. Mixing philosophy, politics, and memoir, Pitner discusses Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, the "ethnocidal terror" faced by his Gullah Geechee ancestors in South Carolina, and the links between modern-day gun culture in the U.S. and the legacy of slavery. Intriguing historical tidbits, such as how the spiritual "Kum Bah Yah" lost its original meaning as a call for God to rescue the Gullah people, buttress Pitner's analysis, but his optimistic conclusion that ethnocide is "unsustainable" runs counter to his central argument that it is baked into American culture. Still, this is a well-intentioned and often incisive examination of the forces of inequality.
Customer Reviews
America Explained
Finally after two centuries comes a book that actually brings clarity to what the American experience really is—a dystopian society built on ethnocide of African and Indigenous culture and that acts with bad faith toward itself.
If you are ready to accept that America is not a good place, then you are ready for the full truth about the ideas that have constructed our reality and led us to where we are now.
Most of all, this clarity is what we need to finally get to the work of figuring out what a good place could be in this land going forward—the work of continuing the Reconstruction of America that began after the Civil War but was cut short after just a few years.
On the other hand, if you are content with living in a society built for pursuing a White essence—both a racial dream and the pursuit of wealth as culture—then you won’t want to read this.
Is this book for you? What kind of person are you? Will you take the red pill or the blue pill?