The winter heath (Erica carnea) in our garden is in full bloom this week in its annual pungling up for the chance to beguile passersby, and I count myself among those riveted by its electric flowers when seen in the gloaming of a late-winter day. Students of Latin will recognize that the specific epithet of the binomial, carnea, means flesh,
which, as Lorraine Harrison, the author of Latin for Gardeners: Over 3,000 Plant Names Explained and Explored, recounts, was assigned to the plant because its flowers are pink.
In other words, this plant is named flesh‐colored heather.
The Europeans who named the plant were steeped in the habits of colonialism, which had begun with the Crusades in the eleventh century. Their tortured use of skin tone as a means of signifying the hue of a pink flower was an example of what today we identify as racism, a social construction developed in medieval Europe concomitant to the advent of nation‐states,
a clear example of which were the estatutos de limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood
or blood‐purity statutes) of the Iberian Peninsula that emerged in the fifteenth century. Scholars classify a refinement of the practice as colorism, which is defined as the process of discrimination that
privileges light‐skinned people of color over their dark‐skinned counterparts.¹ By the sixteenth century, the Europeans had derived the word incarnadine to mean having the pinkish color of flesh
from the Latin incarnates (flesh‐colored
). Flesh is pink. White is good. Dark is evil.
All because Odo of Châtillon fomented a war ten centuries ago.
I am old enough to have had a box of Crayola® crayons that included a color named Flesh, which appeared in the maiden Crayola product line in 1903, was formulated to represent Caucasian skin, and was originally named Flesh Tint until being renamed Flesh in 1949. It was not until 1962 that the Crayola company seems to have awoken to the fact that
the majority of human beings did not have peach‐colored skin, which is when its Flesh crayon was renamed Peach.²
The following year, in his inaugural address as the governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace declared himself in support of preserving the racist status quo with the diacope, I say segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
At The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that summer, in his speech I Have a Dream,
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would proclaim, I have a dream that my four
little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy that November, King told his wife, "This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society."
³
The comedian George Carlin enumerated Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television
in a 1972 monologue: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. He would be arrested for disturbing the peace at a show in Milwaukee when he performed the monologue later that year.⁴ The absurdity of the claim that uttering a couple of barnyard words and a handful of earthy vernacular terms constituted a breach of tranquility at a venue that had hired a nightclub performer and handed him a microphone was hardly lost on me as a teenager. I knew that the words that ought to have shocked the conscience of the early 1970s were those that contemned and outraged others
for their appearance or ethnic heritage — those were the harmful words, the hateful words, the divisive words; the words of diseased minds and incarnate evil. That fall, the commanding officer of the United States Navy aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk presided over a race riot aboard ship while on station in the Gulf of Tonkin
off the coast of North Vietnam.⁵
Months later, the man who is the current president of the United States was successfully sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination because he and his father would not rent apartments in their real estate developments to Black people (39 buildings, between them containing over 14,000 apartments).⁶
The displays of racism in the decades following that lawsuit by the man who is the current president have been well‐ and frequently‐documented; in 2023, for example, during his campaign for election, he claimed repeatedly in interviews, speeches, and social media that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.
Similarly, Adolf Hitler used the term blood poisoning
to disparage immigrants in his 1925 political manifesto,
Mein Kampf.⁷
No wretched refuse of your teeming shore for America today.
Yes, a Black American was elected President of the United States in 2007. That same year, a group calling itself the Sons of Confederate Veterans opened Jefferson Davis Park in
Ridgefield, Washington,
where the flag of the Confederate States of America is flown and markers commemorating the life of the president of those states — after whom the park is named — are on display. The Sons of Confederate Veterans invite us to celebrate
the traitorous Davis because, He sent a peace commission to President Lincoln who refused to meet with them,
and close their encomium by quoting the motto of the Confederacy. In 1860, the first of the eleven states to secede from the United States explained that its doing so was energized by the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States,
whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.
Deo vindice, indeed.
A popular aphorism tells us that, Racism is so American that when you protest it, people think you are protesting America.
⁸
Here, in 1896, in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of separate but equal,
which legally created a racial caste system in America and effectively reduced Black Americans to second‐class citizens in all areas of American life. From the slaveholding George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, to the
support by Herbert Hoover of the Lily White movement; the slave‐trading fortune of Andrew Jackson to the
lickspittle behavior of Dwight Eisenhower
(PDF), who enjoyed telling racist jokes to his golf buddies; the racial
segregation of the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson to the welfare queen
dog‐whistling of Ronald Reagan;
and the 77,303,568 people who voted last year for yet another overt racist (whose opponent was a Black woman) to assume the office of President of the United States; Americans have invested a quarter of a millennium in the burnishing of their racist bona fides, despite their declaration in 1776 that all men are created equal.
From the flowers in the garden to the national magistrate, a thousand years of tragedy wrought by the bards of race may be surveyed from my front windows, rolling on across fruited plain and purple mountains majesty, from sea to shining sea and beyond. It all disgusts me. As an old, white guy thus shielded from the violence and oppression heaped upon those
living in flesh in America that is not peach‐colored, I am largely consigned to the role of witness, in the fashion of one who stands before a conflagration and wonders why the firemen have not yet arrived. I am filled with shame.
H.L. Mencken cautioned us that, Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
We have elected a white supremacist, not in error, but because this buffoon who quotes the author of the Holocaust promises not just to ignore the house afire but to actively stoke the flames. We have given a bully charge of a nuclear apparatus and permission to render asunder the unifying edifices of a century of toil by those who suffer most with their destruction.
We are all stained by its ugliness, but the tyranny of racism presides of our own volition.
I am at a loss. I want this to change. I vote. I write. I feel horror. And sadness. Resignation. Anger. I share the ambivalence of the abolitionist
Theodore Parker, who, in 1853 said, I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
But I wonder when justice will prevail in America for those guilty of nothing other than being human.