The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America

by Barrett Holmes Pitner

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640094840
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	1,041,891
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Barrett Holmes Pitner is a columnist, journalist, and philosopher whose work has been published in The Daily Beast, BBC, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He is the founder of The Sustainable Culture Lab, a cultural think tank with the goals of influencing policy by working with legislators and decision makers, and impacting culture at a grassroots level through events, work, and cultural offerings. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

1 Discovering Ethnocide 9

2 Polderen and Cultivating Culture 25

3 Waiting for Lucky 45

4 Destroying Existence 60

5 Bad Faith and the Facade of Freedom 72

6 The Dialectic of Geistmord 90

7 The Banality of American Evil 108

8 Cultural Vulgarity and Destroying Dignity 131

9 The Language of American Fascism 149

10 The Narrative of the Ethnocidee 178

11 Better Than Utopia 206

12 Cultivating Empathy 227

13 Emancipation and Creating Culture 250

14 A Sustainable Good Place 281

Afterword: American Geist and Soulless Language 297

Acknowledgments 321

Bibliography 323

Editorial Reviews

08/02/2021

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2021-08-26
A Black writer argues that the American inability to face the nation’s racist past is directly related to a lack of vocabulary to describe the violence of White supremacy.

Pitner, the founder of the Sustainable Culture Lab, begins his cogent analysis by introducing the word ethnocide, a term created by Polish Jewish refugee Raphael Lemkin, who immigrated to the U.S. to escape the horrors of World War II. Unlike genocide, which Lemkin also coined, ethnocide describes the practice of erasing “a people’s culture while keeping the people,” a term the author says perfectly describes American slavery. Pitner argues that naming this violence not only gives us the tools to properly digest the atrocities wrought upon Black bodies throughout history, but also to face what must be done to repair American society. To complement the concept of ethnocide, the author presents a few other terms that may be unfamiliar to readers, including polderen, a Dutch word that “articulates the importance of equality and an attachment to place when forging culture,” and poshlyi, a Russian word for vulgarity, which Pitner uses to articulate the damage wrought by Donald Trump and his administration. The author ends the book by discussing naissance and ethnogenesis, both of which he uses to describe the generation of new, more equitable cultural practices that he hopes can redefine the U.S. At its best, this heavily researched book shimmers with creativity and intelligence, expertly balancing realism, optimism, and honesty. At times, though, it can be difficult to keep track of the barrage of terminology, especially since a new word is introduced almost every chapter. Additionally, Pitner draws almost exclusively from White, male, European philosophers; one of the few exceptions is Gandhi, whose problematic attitudes regarding race make him a curious choice for a book that celebrates Black resilience.

A mostly well-argued, deeply felt treatise on the links among language, racism, and redemption.

Kirkus Reviews

An NPR Best Book of the Year

"Pitner's insightful, entirely original argument provides a fascinating new way to understand American national culture and to reclaim identities suppressed by ethnocide." —Booklist

"This heavily researched book shimmers with creativity and intelligence, expertly balancing realism, optimism, and honesty . . . [A] well-argued, deeply felt treatise on the links among language, racism, and redemption." —Kirkus Reviews

"Journalist and philosopher Pitner debuts with an erudite . . . look at how systemic racism imperils Black and Indigenous cultures in the U.S. . . . 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 . . . [An] incisive examination of the forces of inequality." —Publishers Weekly

"As a work of philosophy, clear-eyed journalism, and a deft understanding of history, The Crime Without A Name provides us with a nuanced paradigm to better understand the United States, to live up to values we so love to espouse, and to wrestle with the hereditary sin of systemic racism. This journey into existentialism as humanity is empathetic, exact, and gorgeous. I love this book." —RJ Young, author of Let it Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns

From the Publisher