The Rhetoric of Ownership

How much do you actually own? If you have an active mortgage that you are paying, you do not yet own your house, the bank owns it. If you are actively paying a car loan, then you don’t own your car (it isn’t yours, you commit inaccuracy when you say “mine”) it belongs to the finance company or bank that holds your loan. If, like me, you have student loan debt, then you technically don’t yet own your education even though you may be reaping the rewards already. 

Bottom line, we don’t OWN anything until it is paid off in full. Only then is it MINE. But that logical perception is not the idea that we embrace. In America, we say “my car,” “my house,” “I bought furniture,” “I own a dishwasher,” which is all indicative of possession, instead of the more accurate “the bank’s car,” “the mortgage company’s house,” “Raymour & Flanigan’s furniture,” “Sears’ dishwasher.” We all do it. We tell ourselves and each other in ownership terms what we (technically don’t yet) possess. 

In fact, this concept of ownership is built into our national rhetoric – if you do not “own” a home, you are somehow deficient as a citizen, as though taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt somehow makes you a more responsible adult. Very few people actually understand what “equity” means and how it is a self-perpetuating system designed to keep us in hawk, buying and spending more and more until we are so beholden to the system that our grandchildren may need to sell off our “hard-won” possessions in order to pay off all that we will ultimately owe (not own).

The allure of “ownership”

 When we own property, we are considered trustworthy, responsible, stake holding citizens capable of voting for the right politicians and making the right decisions to move the country forward. Therefore, the millions of people who do not have the cash position (or desire) to participate in this illusion are left out of the equation as untrustworthy, irresponsible, non-stakeholders whose perspectives are wrong for the future of our nation.

This single word damages and skews our view of reality, resulting in quick dismissal of views, opinions, and
perspectives of renters. In the summer 2008 issue of the Journal of Social History, a study of early 20^th century home ownership campaigns in Atlanta appeared by scholar LeeAnn Lands: “Be a patriot, buy a home: Re-imagining home owners and home ownership in early 20^th century Atlanta.” Specifically, the article examines “how Atlanta's land dealers were encouraged towards the national home-ownership trajectory, focusing on how the terms ‘home owner’ and ‘home ownership’ were charged with particular meanings that were, in the 1930s and 1940s, solidified in public policies and patriotic rhetoric.” 

With the government’s tacit approval, we easily dismiss renters’ perspectives on socioeconomic and political issues, voting for community standard-bearers who own a home (or three) and demonstrate the illusion of happy family and fulfilling career. When is the last time you voted for someone who rents in your community? Our political system, our national mythology, and our very sense of patriotism are inextricably shackled to the concept of ownership instead of communality, sacrifice, love, and tolerance. American history is replete with ravages made permissible by this powerful word; the sins committed in the name of ownership are many, including land theft, broken treaties, and global delusions of grandeur.  Our market economy is built on the concept of ownership, which in this country is basically a lie because we misuse the term so vociferously.

Clouded visions

Our rhetorical inaccuracies may help us sleep better at night, but cloud our reality and blind us to the truth. “Our nation” is built, physically, on a lie. This land upon which we all currently sit and work once “belonged” to hundreds of indigenous tribes whose members numbered in the millions. As Europeans invaded the space, spied the fertility of the land and the potential of its resources, hundreds of rhetorical moves were made, like a deadly game of chess where the outcome was pre-determined. We, of any European descent, still benefit from the results of that calculated rhetorical game that changed reality for millions of tribal peoples. It was brilliant, really, and effective enough that we still speak in terms of owning this land today. Remember learning this Woodie Guthrie 1940 folk song in grade school?

        This land is your land,

        This land is my land,

        From California

        To the New York island...

        ...This land was made for you and me.

“This land was made for you and me” is historically inaccurate and factually wrong, but rhetorically powerful as a reinforcement of Euramerican depredations of Native territories as our ancestors sought to enact the idea of ownership on the grandest and most destructive scale possible. It is this reality that we celebrate with songs like Guthrie’s. As if we earned it. As if we should be proud of possessing it. But pride in ownership of anything where the price paid was much too high is suspect and reflects poorly on the character and morality of those who speak in such terms. Take the housing crisis.

How many people who couldn’t actually afford to pay a mortgage got a mortgage? And of those people, who put zero down and walked into a house three times the size of necessity and affordability, who are now in foreclosure, fought the bank by saying, “You have it wrong, we CAN afford this mortgage payment”? But the lure of “ownership” attracted them as surely as it compelled the mortgage company or bank to look the other way or ignore facts as those people filled out mortgage applications. 

“Ownership” validates one’s existence in America. If you don’t “own,” you haven’t succeeded. Just listen to one of our former presidents: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVdTzPEYvH4

“If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of America.” Wow. Thanks for making my case, W. In other words, if you don’t own anything, you don’t have a vital stake in the future of this nation and are, therefore, less worthy and less valuable as a citizen. 

In 1998, Dr. Jack Goodman wrote the following for the National Multi Housing Council: “The pro-ownership rhetoric from government officials and business interests typically goes way beyond the facts. The benefits of homeownership often are overstated, and important drawbacks usually are ignored.” Specifically, these drawbacks include overrated investment value, imaginary financial benefits (such as tax breaks), and loss of “labor market mobility” when a better job in a different region comes along. Imagine if those people who are now losing their homes had heeded this advice.

The rhetoric of ownership only serves to divide us and set the stage for unrealistic ambitions and unhealthy desires that will ultimately go unfulfilled, which can lead to stress, frustration, and isolation when things don’t work out. Even worse is the stigma attached to those who don’t “own.” Who don’t even try to “own,” or (worse) have no desire to “own.” Instead of promoting ownership, our political, corporate, and financial leaders should be promoting community development, affordable and safe housing for renters, and the more abstract concept that our society collectively owns, but has turned its back on: the pursuit of happiness (not possessions).

21st century consequences: Part 1

As an opening salvo to this blog, I intend to share some of my recent research on the state of African Americans and Native Americans in 21st century America. I have just begun to research this issue and am planning to attempt academic publication, but I also feel the need to share my findings with normal, everyday people on the off chance that it might inspire others to take even a small beneficial action. Hence, my plan is to incorporate ideas for action and potential solutions into future posts and I hope to inspire others to consider entering the conversation, suggesting solutions, and perhaps acting on them. One of the elements lacking in contemporary American society is action. We all like to talk a good game...but how often does that translate to tangible positive action with workable solutions? Not often enough.

This first entry introduces the Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the American Indian Movement from the perspective of the women who were involved in these movements. If you learn something new, I encourage you to investigate the history of these groups, learn more, and share that knowledge with others. (A small list of suggested reading can be found at the end of this post.) One of the sad results of my current research is the realization that too many people don't know about these groups - not as they really are. Rather, we are fed lies, such as "Members of the Black Panther Party were terrorists." I heard this - or something to this effect - recently on Fox News. Couldn't be farther from the truth. But too often, the truth is lost among fallacies and detrimental, fear-based rhetoric. Trust no one - least of all television and cable news channels. Don't even trust what I'm writing...always investigate and research for yourself.

Here we go - I hope you enjoy, learn something new, and please feel free to respond with your own ideas, comments, and knowledge! And thank you for visiting!

- Amanda

A View From Inside

Typically, when the Black Power Movement (BPM) and the American Indian Movement (AIM) are the subject of discourse, one reads about men, the male perspective, the male opinion. However, the women in these movements were powerful, opinionated, and strong. Consequently, their voices contribute acute observations from inside that allows for a broader perspective when considering the movements’ long-term ramifications. Mary Crow Dog, author of Lakota Woman and former AIM member, cites an “old Cheyenne saying: ‘A nation is not dead until the hearts of its women are on the ground.’”[i] Indeed, women are the heart of these two movements because they are the oppressed within an oppressed group. To be American Indian or African American and female in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to be in the ultimate position of struggle. To survive this position, or even thrive, succeed and inspire others, these women possessed strong hearts, great dignity, and wise words. According to Black Panther member Connie Matthews in a speech delivered at a Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in October 1969, “We have to understand that the struggle at this moment is a world struggle [. . .] the oppressed versus the oppressor.”[ii] These words find an echo in Huey Newton’s writings, Malcolm X’s speeches, and Amiri Baraka’s rhetoric. Lorelei DeCora Means writes about the secondary nature of womanhood to the main struggle in “Women of All Red Nations” in 1974: “Native women took on both traditional and activist roles: some cooked, some took care of children, and others marched, petitioned, occupied, and fought alongside their brothers to force the U.S. government to acknowledge its treaty obligations […] to open a new era of tribal self-determination and native rights.”[iii] Because of this gender equality of labor and purpose within AIM and the BPM, one could argue that women had just as much, if not more, at stake in this battle. Means continues,

We are American Indian women, in that order. We are oppressed, first and foremost, as American Indians, as peoples colonized by the United States of America, not as women. [. . .] Decolonization is the agenda, the whole agenda, and until it is accomplished it is the only agenda that counts for American Indians.[iv]

More than anyone else, women had the most to gain and to lose in this national and global struggle for economic, political, and cultural parity. Means’s words make a clear distinction between her fight and the larger women’s liberation movement. Unlike participants in the second wave feminist movement in the dominant American culture, Indian and black women’s homes, economic and political futures, and families were at stake.

In Joan Bird’s case, she joined the New York Black Panthers in 1968 after receiving a nursing degree and wanting more. She writes, “I needed and wanted to be fully aware of myself, the changing world, my people’s true identity and their roles in society and the need for us to unite if we are ever going to achieve any sort of power.”[v] The desire to learn about herself, the black community, and to assist in the fight for power drove Bird to embrace the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program and become an active volunteer. Likewise, Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther Party member, epitomizes the resolve and passion required by women of color to thrive under multiple layers of oppression. In her letter from the New York Women’s House of Detention, Shakur writes,

We know that we are a colony, living under community imperialism. The U.S. that we see is not one of freedom, beauty, and wisdom, but of fear, terror, and hate. This is a nation of your laws, run by your police, and based on protecting your economic strength. The poor are politically, economically, and legally non-existent.[vi]

This colonization, imperialism, and division Shakur refers to finds echoes in Lorelei Means’s and Mary Crow Dog’s words, and can doubly apply to the underlying themes of the American Indian Movement.

Far from the grit of New York, on the other side of the country at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in 1971, Mary Crow Dog first encountered AIM at a powwow after the Sun Dance. She writes in retrospect, “I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly,” but at that time, as a “wild rebellious teenager,” Crow Dog was enthralled with the visual and verbal messages of AIM’s leaders.[vii] She recalls one Chippewa man who “spoke about genocide and sovereignty, about tribal leaders selling out and kissing ass—white man’s ass. […] He had himself wrapped up in an upside-down American flag, telling us that every star in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.”[viii] One young man told Crow Dog, “‘We are AIM…American Indian Movement. We’re going to change things’.”[ix] Change was heralded by the vibrations of these puzzle pieces moving into place, with women staunchly supporting the fight for jobs, better health care, and decent housing for their families and communities. Crow Dog also acknowledges AIM’s explicit connection to the Black Power Movement: “We took some of our rhetoric from the blacks, who had started their movements before we did. Like them we were minorities, poor and discriminated against, but there were differences.”[x] Some of these differences are revealed when comparing the two groups’ written platforms. Despite some programmatic variations in themes, goals and actions, many aspects of the Black Power Movement and AIM were frighteningly similar, such as the effect each movement had on their own communities and the dominant white society. Crow Dog writes succinctly: “Some people loved AIM, some hated it, but nobody ignored it.”[xi] Indeed, the same can be said about the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. Ultimately, without the support of each community’s women, these movements likely would not have lasted as long as they did or had the resulting impact on the shifting American landscape.

---

[i] Lakota Woman, p. 80

[ii] Black Panthers Speak, p. 154

[iii] Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel, & Troy Johnson eds. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom, University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edition 1999, p. 51

[iv] Red Power, p. 52

[v] Black Panthers Speak, p. 160

[vi] Black Panthers Speak, p. 162

[vii] Lakota Woman, p. 74

[viii] ibid, p. 75

[ix] ibid p. 75

[x] Lakota Woman, p. 77

[xi] ibid, p. 74

Suggested Reading:

Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel, & Troy Johnson eds. Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for
Freedom, University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edition 1999.

Baraka, Amiri. “Tokenism.” LeRoi Jones, HOME social essays. New York: William Morrow, 1966.

Crow Dog, Mary. Lakota Woman. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

Foner, Philip ed. The Black Panthers Speak. Orig. New York: HarperCollins,1970. Cambridge, MA: Da
Capo Press 2^nd ed, 2002

(More suggestions will be made with each post)
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