A New Word to Reshape Our Perspective
Ethnocide • (eth-no-cide) • noun
Definition: The destruction of a people's culture, while keeping the bodies of the people.
Origin: Greek ethnos meaning “culture,” “race,” or “people” and Latin -cide meaning “killing” or “murder”
The word ethnocide helps describe the foundation of American society and forms the impetus of the vital work at The Sustainable Culture Lab.
In 1944 during the height of World War II, a European refugee to the United States and Polish-Jew named Raphael Lemkin desperately wanted to explain to American politicians and military leaders the horrors befalling European Jews at the hands of the Nazis. However many didn’t care to listen because they did not believe that the Germans were capable of committing such atrocities, and others argued that there was little America could do because these crimes were not illegal at the time. The capacity to systematically murder your own people was considered a sovereign right of nation-states, and not a crime against humanity. Thus the American government did not initially consider the Nazi’s killing of European Jews as an act of war. No matter what he said, few wanted to listen to Lemkin, and eventually, he realized that he needed to create a new word to describe this new type of crime.
In 1944, Lemkin invented the words genocide and ethnocide, and while genocide has gone on to re-write international law and change the world, ethnocide has remained largely forgotten for the last half-century. Initially, Lemkin envisioned that the words could be interchangeable because the Jewish people were both a people, or genos, and a culture, ethnos, but over time the words diverged into two different meanings. With genocide, a people get destroyed and their culture dies with them, but with ethnocide, the culture gets destroyed and the people remain.
As the world focused on genocide, ethnocide remained ignored, but at SCL we have brought back Lemkin’s less well-known word to describe the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage because this was a horror that systematically worked to destroy the culture of African people while keeping their bodies. Too often when describing the transatlantic slave trade, people apply the word “genocide” to describe this barbarism. However, the end goals of genocide and ethnocide are vastly different even though they have overlapping acts of terror. Genocide wants to exterminate or remove a people, and ethnocide wants to perpetually oppress a people through the destruction of culture. Understanding this distinction is key to understanding American society.
Starting in the fifteenth century, Europeans systematically worked to destroy the culture of African people in order to create an enslaved population in the Americas. Preventing Africans from speaking their languages, practicing their religions, and sustaining their cultures became integral to turning a liberated African into an enslaved person. Europeans wanted to destroy African culture, but keep the people, which is precisely ethnocide.
The society created in the Americas by Europeans was founded upon ethnocide, and much of our social norms today are still based around sustaining ethnocidal division.
Gentrification is a textbook example of ethnocide in America today. A city is divided between groups of people who can exploit (a.k.a. the perpetrator of ethnocide), and others who are exploited (the recipient of ethnocide). The exploited area receives very little support from the government, and the recipient’s income normally depends on work that exists in the perpetrator’s part of town. The exploited cannot live far away because then it would be harder to exploit them. Eventually, one of two things happens and creates gentrification. Either capitalism makes it incredibly difficult for the perpetrators to live in their own neighborhoods and they move to the affordable community of the recipients, or the recipients build up and invest in their community and now the perpetrators move into their neighborhood. The tension of gentrification is cultural because the culture of ethnocide discourages the perpetrator from embracing and joining in the culture of the recipient’s community. Gentrification is an invasion of cultural destruction.
In both cases, the problem with gentrification is not that new people have moved into the neighborhood, but that the culture of the perpetrator works to destroy the culture of the recipient. Many people now call gentrification “cultural genocide,” but the word ethnocide is much more accurate.
America’s racial divisions and our systematic inequality are all byproducts of ethnocide. For centuries, we have lived within an ethnocidal society, yet we never had a word to accurately describe the environment in which we live. Through raising awareness and countering ethnocide, our hope is to change this profound cultural deficit.
Ethnocide harms everyone it touches, both the perpetrator and recipient. The perpetrator is encouraged to form exploitative, parasitic relationships and live off of the destruction of another’s culture. The recipient is forced to live within a world where exploitation and the destruction of their culture remain the greatest societal certainty. No one should want to live as the perpetrator or the recipient of ethnocide, but this is how everyone is pressured to live under systemic ethnocide.
This week as you go about your day, we would like to invite you to reflect on ethnocide and take note of the ways you think ethnocide manifests in today’s society. If you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and observations with us, please email us at theword@scl.community.
This may be a challenging endeavor because ethnocide is not a pleasant topic, but in the weeks to come we will also share new words and practices to help you combat ethnocide and cultivate Eǔtopia. See you next week.
P.S. Don't forget to register for "Freecano - A Philosophy & Art Virtual Exhibition."
The exhibition is online on April 16 from 7-9 pm ET. We have over 10 artists participating in the event, so this will be a great chance to see great art and philosophy without leaving your home! You can register by clicking here.