File:A Brief History of The United States of America

Description
Partway through the documentary BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE,filmmaker Michael Moore offers up an animated "Brief History of the United States of America," by Harold Moss of Flickerlab, which outlines the ways that racial fear has shaped U.S. sensibility. The story goes, briefly, like this: Pilgrims cross the Atlantic to esca...pe persecution; in the New World, they run into scary Native Americans whom they proceed to massacre. Importing free labor from Africa ("the genius of slavery"), the New World denizens find more reason to be afraid, arm themselves against rebellion, and soon the U.S. is "the richest country in the world." Increasing internal resistance to this particular economic system is met by the invention of multiple shot weapons, and when the KKK is declared illegal (a "terrorist organization"), the NRA is born. As blacks migrated to cities, "whites ran in fear to the suburbs, and once in the suburbs, still afraid, they bought millions and millions of guns" in an inevitably failing effort to preserve their property, privilege, and sense of "order." And so on.

As antic as the images may be -- crowds of little white folks running from one section of the cartoon map to another, waving their weapons, with stricken looks on their flat little faces -- the point is made. Much fear in the U.S. is racially based. Moore goes on to point to a variety of examples, some more clearly related than others -- "Africanized" killer bees, racialized designations of the "evildoers," Willie Horton, Susan Smith (who accused a "black man" of carjacking the children she killed), Charles Stuart (who accused a "black man" of murdering his pregnant wife), and the ongoing fear of perps "of color" inculcated and promoted by the long-running series Cops.