The Crime Without a Name

August 2, 2021
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.