Bombs are Dropping, but Never Here
Summary: The violence Russia is perpetrating in Ukraine horrifies and mesmerizes us while at the same time we want to look away from the violence in our own country and society.
Ukraine the country is being destroyed. Ukraine the people are fleeing, fighting. Families are being torn apart. The World Health Organization estimates that Russia has shelled 18 hospitals in 15 days, including a maternity hospital. “Humanitarian corridors” are agreed upon to allow civilians to flee, but when they try to leave, Russian troops fire on them.
Sunday morning, March 13, brought the news that a Ukrainian military base 5 miles from the Polish border had been shelled, destroying much of the base and killing and wounding many soldiers. The United States has 10,000 troops stationed in Poland. If one bomb or missile goes astray, the U.S. and allies will be at war again. This will not be a ‘limited’ war that drags on for years. Western governments are afraid this could be the beginning of World War Three.
Yes, a new World War is a clear and present danger, but other than the rising price of gas, most U.S. citizens do not seem terribly concerned. After all, Russian bombs are not dropping here.
Let me reframe that. For most white U.S. citizens, the threat of violence to our homes and communities seems very far away.
Sunday afternoon I attended a performance of the play Nina Simone: Four Women. It is set in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama shortly after the bombing that killed four girls who were getting ready for Sunday School. Smoke drifts down from a blown-out window and the sounds of demonstrations and more violence intermittently waft in from outside. Say their names, insists one of the women — they are not just four girls, they are Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
They say bombs don’t drop here.
“On July 27, 1816, a fort on the Apalachicola River in Florida was fire bombed by the U.S. Army. The fort had provided home and safety to more than 300 African and Choctaw families. This was a key battle in the Seminole Wars.”
That was the first “bombing” I found recorded. It was followed by dozens and dozens of massacres of indigenous and African American peoples and communities. The next recorded bombing was in May of 1921 when during a massacre of a black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, white men allegedly took small planes up and dropped kerosene bombs on homes during the massacre.
They say bombs don’t drop here.
But “on May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a C-4 bomb on the home of the MOVE organization, killing eleven people — including five children — and wiping out 61 homes in two city blocks.”
Let me reframe again.
Bombs don’t drop here on white communities and white homes and businesses. And generally white people don’t die during traffic stops or entry into our homes with no-knock warrants. And we aren’t gunned down by police for jaywalking or falling asleep in our cars in a fast-food line or wearing a hoodie, or…
The violence Russia is perpetrating in Ukraine horrifies us. We can see the violence. We have started each day for nearly three weeks now with new pictures and accounts of bombings and destruction. But I am also horrified that in the United States the structures of white supremacy that have been in place for so long they seem “natural” to most white Americans — those structures are invisible. We don’t see the violence, we don’t see the lives, the families, the futures destroyed just as surely Ukrainians fleeing for their lives, just as surely as those four children in Birmingham Alabama.
They say bombs don’t drop here. Except when they do.
